Every person counts. And everyone counted during the City of Tshwane’s first official homeless count, counts! This is a critical moral, political and theological assertion, and insistence. It is also a critical methodological reminder. Losing one survey form, or miscounting, or messing up data, is miscounting one person’s dignity, importance and information. Without such insistence..
Read moreThe ‘good city’ or ‘post-colonial catch-basins of violent empire’? A contextual theological appraisal of South Africa’s Integrated Urban Development Framework
The Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) was constructed as a ‘new deal’ for South African cities and towns. It outlines a vision with four overarching goals and eight priorities or policy levers meant to overcome the apartheid legacy through comprehensive spatial restructuring and strategic urban–rural linkages. This article is a contextual theological reflection ‘from below’,..
Read more‘Between life and death’: On land, silence and Liberation in the captal city
This article reflects on the unfinished task of liberation – as expressed in issues of land – and drawing from the work of Franz Fanon and the Durban-based social movement Abahlali base Mjondolo. It locates its reflections in four specific sites of struggle in the City of Tshwane, and against the backdrop of the mission..
Read moreDoing theology with children: Exploring emancipatory methodologies
This article serves as an introduction to a collection of articles that explores emancipatorymethodologies for doing theology and research with children. We focus on both the agency and the participation of children as an ethics and children’s rights imperative as well as the potential impact and outcomes of theology and research that focus on children...
Read moreChange-making in a (post)apartheid city: An auto-ethnographical essay
We reflect on living and doing ministry in a (post)apartheid South African city, negotiating ongoing demographic and sociopolitical transitions and discerning appropriate faith responses. We speak about the inevitability of these transitions, but then suggest that a view of theology and ministry as change-making is not inevitable but a vocation and art to be acknowledged,..
Read moreDemythologising social cohesion: Towards a practical
This article considers the topical issue of social cohesion. It seeks to demythologise the issue bringing it into critical conversation with eight related categories. It proposes that a vision of a socially cohesive society should employ all eight categories as parallel and complementary strategies. Secondly, it proposes a practical theological vision of social cohesion that..
Read moreCity-making from below: A call for communities of resistance and reconstruction
This article laments the exclusion of small, local communities, voices and visions, from participating in making the city. It makes a case for ‘small communities’ practising resistance and reconstruction in multiple ways and places. Instead of viewing such actions as naïve or a-political, it calls for an understanding of such practices as alternatives to ‘top-down’..
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