My world on the web
Richard Brent Turner on A Love Supreme, Artistic Transformation, and the Black Arts Movement
Jon Toogood built a career as frontman for the New Zealand rock band Shihad, infusing stadium-sized songs with his avowed atheism. But when he fell in love with a Muslim woman, he didn’t expect to wrestle with his identity and beliefs — and things he never saw coming.
It was interesting to go back and re-listen to The General Electric again with this in mind.
As a side note, I am intrigued to know how much swearing their was in his music thesis.
For a different take on Shihad, Dan Condon has traced their legacy with the release of Old Gods.
What if we were to nurture the good in any faith we have, be it a faith in God, a faith in humanity, or faith in ourselves to be loving, thoughtful, and kind. We are put on this earth for a relatively short time, how can we maximize the good that we do while we are here?
God bless us, everyone. pic.twitter.com/R3eIGgN45m
— RevDaniel (@RevDaniel) December 24, 2019
- Pentecostal churches are growing, while other Christian denominations are declining
- The denomination began in Los Angeles in the early 1900s before arriving in Australia
- Modern Pentecostals in Australia often embrace ‘prosperity doctrine’
I empathize with the Muslims who died in New Zealand both as Muslim who used to live as a religious minority in a Christian country and as Muslim in a Muslim majority country where extremists threaten other religious minorities.
So what do we do? As educators, as citizens, as parents, I believe strongly in promoting empathy, resisting “othering” and promoting a contextual, historical and intersectional understanding of social justice, and this can be an approach to digital citizenship, as I wrote a few years ago. And we need to “know the other” and keep expanding and deepening those ties and bridges.
This is part two of my Beyond Belief project, where every month during 2019 I plan to experience a different religion that I know nothing about. This month its Sikhism.
I spent nearly five week in Bali over the December/January period, so Balinese Hinduism seems like an obvious place to start. As part of Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim country, Bali is a religious outlier with nearly 85% of the island’s population identifying as Hindu. Its version of Hinduism is a little different to that traditionally found in India, which is polytheistic (believing in many gods), and it has quite a different feel to the other Muslim parts of Indonesia. Balinese Hinduism claims to be monotheistic, with only one god, although it seems to me that in practice this is not always the case, based on so many different statues I saw everywhere. There were statues of Vishnu and Ganesha and many, many others that I didn’t recognise, so I’m not totally sure how the monotheistic thing applies.
