Wednesday, September 5, 2007

African Anglicans Try to Transform US Church

An interesting article in today's Boston Globe that really highlights something we will be discussing while reading our first novel, Things Fall Apart. This quote is especially relevant:
All these people brought Christianity to us, but now the church is growing here [in Africa] like wildfire, it's spreading everywhere, while the church in England is withering, the church in the States is going completely, and there has been a cry, 'Why don't you come? You should have come here a long time ago to evangelize,' " said Archbishop Bernard A. Malango, the Anglican primate of Central Africa. "We need to send missionaries, even to Britain; we need to send missionaries to the United States, and we need to send missionaries to Canada, because those who brought the church here have lost what their intention was, and the same Bible they brought to us is being misinterpreted. We find it very odd.


This might give you some insight to the kind of struggles and conflicts that are at work in this novel The whole article is here.

2 comments:

Sean O'Mack said...

This is a prime example of segregation brought on by religion, we follow a book that has been re-written over the many years that it has been in circulation. There is much controversy over the bible because peoples perception of the literature can be entirely different. People say that the bible says that Sodom and Gamora were destroyed because their inhabitants were polygamous yet there is no proof of this in any other texts except for the bible. The only people who read the original print of the bible are the Pope and the other Cardinals in the Vatican. I believe that we shouldn't let such an out dated story tell us how to run our lives, we are finally realizing our wrongs and are attempting to change our laws and yet we're still held back by overzealous religious freaks.

Mr Morey said...

Religion runs through a lot of what we'll study this year. It's a big part of culture, but there are so many different groups/sects it's important to be careful when talking about religion in a broad sense. There's lots of different types of Christians, Hindus, Muslims, etc. And yet, are there certain things that are truly universal? Or no?