Christina Landman

A Public Theology for Intimate Spaces

This article explores public theology as a means of making public the needs of the voiceless, here with a focus on harm suffered in intimate spaces. The plight of farm labourers living on commercial farms in the Hoedspruit area in north-east South Africa is presented as a case study. In spite of national laws regulating domestic relationships, farm workers are vulnerable to HIV infection and domestic violence, in part because of religious discourses that impose hierarchical relationships on men and women and rob the individual of ownership over his or her own body. The reworking of harmful religious discourses into healthy practices is presented in this article as a set of tenets of a public theology that would bring healing and safety to people who, at present voicelessly, suffer violence in intimate spaces, in a country where cultural and religious taboos prevent clear information on this subject from entering the public arena.

Women flying with God: Allan Boesak's contribution to the liberation of women of faith in South Africa

In 2005 Allan Boesak published a book entitled Die Vlug van Gods Verbeelding (“The Flight of God’s Imagination”). It contains six Bible studies on women in the Bible, who are Hagar, Tamar, Rizpah, the Syrophoenician woman, the Samaritan woman as well as Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus. This article argues that women of faith in South Africa have, throughout the ages, in religious literature been stylised according to six depictions, and that Boesak has, in the said book, undermined these enslaving depictions skilfully. The six historical presentations deconstructed by Boesak through the Bible studies are the following: 1) Women are worthy only in their usefulness to church and family without agency of their own; 2) A good woman is submissive on all levels, privately and publicly; 3) Women should sacrifice themselves to the mission of the church, without acknowledgment that they themselves are victims of patriarchy; 4) A good white woman is one that is loyal to the nation and to her husband while black women are to reject their cultures; 5) Women’s piety is restricted to dealing with their personal sins, while they are not to express their piety in public; 6) Women are forbidden by the Bible to participate in ordained religion.After references to these discourses in Christian literature of the past 200 years, the contents of Boesak’s Bible studies will be analysed to determine how—and how far—he has moved from these traditional views of women of faith. Finally the research findings will be summarised in a conclusion.

THE EXPERIENCES OF THIRTEEN WOMEN MINISTERS OF THE METHODIST CHURCH OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

The year 2016 marks the 40 th anniversary of the ordination of women into the ministry of Word and Sacraments in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. What are their experiences during their ministry whilst being in a covenantal relationship with the church and their ordained colleagues? What are the particular concerns and issues raised by a sample of 13 women ministers who have served for a total of 90 years since their ordination in the church? The paper describes the unique relationship between the church and ministers and then presents the findings of the experiences of the sample, indicating that the women ministers in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa are being discriminated against in various ways and struggling to find acceptance and appointments in financially viable circuits.

FAITH–BASED COMMUNITIES AND POLITICS IN DULLSTROOM-EMNOTWENI: LOCAL STORIES OF IDENTITY

A majority of the black community of Dullstroom-Emnotweni in the Mpumalanga highveld in the east of South Africa trace their descent back to the southern Ndebele of the so-called ‘Mapoch Gronden’, who lost their land in the 1880s to become farm workers on their own land. A hundred years later, in 1980, descendants of the ‘Mapoggers’ settled in the newly built ‘township’ of Dullstroom, called Sakhelwe, finding jobs on the railways or as domestic workers. Oral interviews with the inhabitants of Sakhelwe – a name eventually abandoned in favour of Dullstroom- Emnotweni – testify to histories of transition from landowner to farmworker to unskilled labourer. The stories also highlight cultural conflicts between people of Ndebele, Pedi and Swazi descent and the influence of decades of subordination on local identities. Research projects conducted in this and the wider area of the eMakhazeni Local Municipality reveal the struggle to maintain religious, gender and youth identities in the face of competing political interests. Service delivery, higher education, space for women and the role of faith-based organisations in particular seem to be sites of contestation. Churches and their role in development and transformation, where they compete with political parties and state institutions, are the special focus of this study. They attempt to remain free from party politics, but are nevertheless co-opted into contra-culturing the lack of service delivery, poor standards of higher education and inadequate space for women, which are outside their traditional role of sustaining an oppressed community.

Free but fragile: Human relations amidst poverty and HIV in democratic South Africa

Dullstroom-Emnotweni is the highest town in South Africa. Cold and misty, it is situated in the eastern Highveld, halfway between the capital Pretoria/Tswane and the Mozambique border. Alongside the main road of the white town, 27 restaurants provide entertainment to tourists on their way to Mozambique or the Kruger National Park. The inhabitants of the black township, Sakhelwe, are remnants of the Southern Ndebele who have lost their land a century ago in wars against the whites. They are mainly dependent on employment as cleaners and waitresses in the still predominantly white town. Three white people from the white town and three black people from the township have been interviewed on their views whether democracy has brought changes to this society during the past 20 years. Answers cover a wide range of views. Gratitude is expressed that women are now safer and HIV treatment available. However, unemployment and poverty persist in a community that nevertheless shows resilience and feeds on hope. While the first part of this article relates the interviews, the final part identifies from them the discourses that keep the black and white communities from forming a group identity that is based on equality and human dignity as the values of democracy.

SEXUALITY AND SPIRITUALITY IN ASOUTH AFRICAN FEMALE CORRECTIONAL CENTRE

In the first part of this study, the faces of spiritual discourses in a South African female correctional centre are described as they are shaped by culture, race, religious background, and the need for physical contact. The source of this part of the study is the researcher’s own observations whilst working in the Pretoria Female Correctional Centre on behalf of the (South African) Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons. The second and main part of the study describes the interface between spirituality and sexuality in this correctional centre as discourses holding the correctees captive in frustration and misunderstanding. The sources of this part of the study are hand-written testimonies by the correctees themselves which they prepared willingly at the request of the researcher. In the final part of the study, alternative religious discourses on the incarcerated female body are proposed.

Talking hope – Dirkie Smit and public theology

Dirkie Smit creating dialogical space between Habermas’ criticism of rationality and the criticism of experience required by the South African context of poverty and gender bias is explored. The contribution of Smit’s public voice is argued in terms of a criticism of survival which is as yet unsuccessfully lodged from the “private” spaces of the geographically marginalised, that is, believers living in rural “townships” who do not have access to public spheres or theology. It is concluded that Smit’s contextualisation of Habermas’ call for a critical rationality in the public sphere finds a legitimate place in him “talking hope”, albeit rationally limited, to people who are still oppressed by illiteracy and genderised behaviour. It is proposed that Smit expands the criticism of rationality which he holds in common with Habermas, to a prophetic and public voice that is based on a criticism of experience and survival in which the voices and needs of the voiceless will be heard and contra-cultured.

Book Reviews/Boekresensies

James K. Hoffmeier is one of few scholars who are experts in the fields of both Egyptology and OT Studies. In two former books which are, like the present book, published in Oxford University Press (Israel in Egypt [1996] and Ancient Israel in Sinai [2005]), his focus was on Israel and the OT at its intersection with Egypt in the Exodus event. In his present book, however, the focus is on Egypt and only in the last chapter he turns to the OT and the question of the relationship between Akhenaten’s and Israel’s monotheism.

Responses to 'The piety of Afrikaans women'

The book The piety of Afrikaans women is placed in the context of the methodological discussion on religion feminism, that is religion feminism as it was discussed in Western Europe in the early 1990s. It is argued that in South Africa the book was not read against this background but as an onslaught on Afrikanerdom and as a liberal effort to alienate metaphysics from spirituality. Three reactions for and against the contents of the book are discussed. The first refers to local nationalism, the second to the political agenda of womens spirituality and the third to the relationship between spirituality and historical criticism.