Last Saturday evening we had our Slava at St Nicholas Church. Slava is a Serbian custom, a family name day, celebrated on the saints day on which the first members of the family became Christian. We were received into the Orthodox Church on 8 November 1987, the feast of St Michael and all the Bodiless Powers of Heaven (Michaelmas).

Normally we have our Slava at home, but since it fell on a weekend this year, we had it at Church, after Vespers



We were also married on the Western equivalent celebration, 29th September.

There are lots more pictures on my other blog, Khanya, where uploading pictures is easier.

seraphimsigrist recently posted a poll on spiritual heartlands,showing pictures of Radonezh in Russia which is more or less the home of Russian monasticism, and asked readers to think of similar places in their own countries.

In trying to think of such places in South Africa, one that came to mind was Marishane, the site of the martyrdom of Manche Masemola, which has become a place of pilgrimage. I've written about it in more detail and put pictures on my Khanya blog, where it is easier to post pictures than on LJ.

Yesterday I read of the death of Mary Travers on a blog.

I read a bit more in the alt.obituaries newsgroup.

I waited in vain for a news bulletin on TV to mention it, but not a word. OK, I couldn't watch all stations at once, but a couple of months ago Michael Jackson's death pushed all other news off every channel for 3 days. The previous day there were reports about people protesting against alleged vote-rigging in the Iranian elections being beaten up, and how the Iranian government was trying to censor the reports from getting out, but was unable to. Michael Jackson succeeded where they failed. And there was a repeat at his funeral. No other news, on any channel. The world stopped for it.

I can't recall a single song sung by Michael Jackson.

I may have heard some on the radio, but would not have associated with him, or taken note of the titles because I wanted to listen to them again.

But I can remember lots of songs sung by Mary Travers and her partners Pete Yarrow and Paul Stookey.

Puff the magic dragon (of course)
Tramp on the street
I shall be released
Stewball
Lemon tree
The cruel war ... the list goes on.

It was my generation that invented the generation gap.

And now I've obviously crossed it, and I'm stuck on the wrong side.

He was some mother's darling
He was some mother's son
Once he was fair
And once he was young
Mary she rocked him
A little baby to sleep
But they left him to die like
a tramp on the street.

There's been quite a lot of discussion on health care in the blogosphere recently, and a group of us decided to have a synchroblog on Christian approaches to healthcare. Here is the list of posts so far:

• Phil Wyman at Square No More: Clowns to the Left. Jokers to the Right. Stuck in the Middle of the Health Care Debate
• K.W. Leslie at The Evening of Kent: Christian's Responsibility to Healthcare
• Ellen Haroutunain: Christian Perspectives on Health Care
• Steve Hayes at Khanya: Self-evident Truths and Moral Turpitude
• Kimber Caldwell at Convergence: Is Health Care a Right?
• Beth Patterson at Virtual Tea House: Baby Steps Toward More Humane Humanity
• Liz Dyer at Grace Rules Weblog: A Christian Perspective on Health Care Reform
• Kathy Escobar at Carnival in My Head: It's Easy to be Against Health Care Reform When You Have Insurance
• Susan Barnes at A Book Look: Carrying Your Own Load

I was a little disappointerd that many of the participants, especially those in the USA where it is very much a current issue, didn't step back a bit and try to get a more Christian, rather than a political perspective on it. Whatever solutions they proposed or rejected, very few gave the theological reasoning behind the views they expressed.

For example, some said that "health care is a right".

Now some people say that they are tired of hearing about rights, and we don't talk enough about duties. And one of the paradigm cases in the New Testament is the story of the rich man and Lazarus. In the parable Jesus says nothing about the right of Lazarus to health care; he says a great deal more about the duty of the rich man to care for Lazarus.

Anyway, if you are interested in the issue, there's some reading for you, from a disparate group of Christians in various parts of the world.

I boycotted The Citizen newspaper, because it was financed by taxpayers' money to promote government propaganda.

Back in 1974 most of the English newspapers in South Africa were centre-right, which from the government's point of view was "left". That just goes to show that talk of "left" and "right" in politics (and just about everything else) gives you a better idea of the speakers point of view than that of whatever the speaker is describing.

So the government backed a new newspaper, The Citizen, to plug the current politically correct line. I reckoned that since I had already paid for it with my taxes, they ought to give it to me free, and refused to buy it on principle. I still don't buy it, though the ownership has changed since then.

It achieved its object when the main opposition paper, which did some good investigative journalism on stuff the government tried to hide, went belly up in 1985 -- that was The Rand Daily Mail.

The main aim was to win English-speaking voters for the National Party. But ironically enough, it had it's biggest readership among blacks, who in those days didn't have the vote. I asked one black friend why he bought it, and he said it was so he could see what the other side were thinking, but as it was the only paper he bought, I thought he was getting a pretty one-sided picture.

But the reason most black people bought it was because of its horseracing section -- that was the only legal form of gambling back then.

For several years I've kept in touch with people who share similar literary interests by means of Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists. Now many ISPs are withdrawing their news service (it does require rather a lot of server space) and so traffic in the newsgroups has dropped off a lot, and I've lost contact with a lot of the people with whom I used to have interesting conversations in the newsgroups.

I've found an alternative way of keeping in contact, through Good Reads, where you can find me at http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw. But more on that later (see below).

For those who have suffered the fate of losing access to newsgroups, there is a free news server at news.eternal-september.org where you can subscribe to the various newsgroups.

My favourite newsgroups for books and reading are:

• alt.books.cs-lewis
• alt.books.inklings
• alt.books.beatgeneration
• rec.arts.books.tolkien

The Tolkien group still thrives, but the others have almost emptied of participants since some of the major ISPs stopped their nntp service.

If you click on those links, your web browser should automatically take you to your default newsreader, but if your ISP is one of those that no longer provides news (I bet they didn't reduce their subs for the reduced service) you will not be able to do much unless you set your news reader up to connect to a server like eternal-september.

There are also other newsgroups that are (or were) useful for those who like books and reading:

• rec.arts.books
• rec.arts.books.childrens
• alt.usage.english

Most of the better-informed participants in rec.arts.books took themselves off to a Facebook group called The Prancing Half-Wits, but the Facebook interface is clunky, and does not lend itself to interactive discussions the way newsgroups do. alt.usage.english continues to thrive, perhaps because many of the participants are a bit more computer-savvy than most, and know how to connect to alternative news sources.

For those interested in the Inklings (C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien & Co) I've started a mailing list called Neo-Inklings, which you can find at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eldil/. To subscribe to it, send e-mail to eldil-subscribe@yahoogroups.com, but it is worth also visiting the web site, as there are facilities for uploading files and photos, creating polls and databases and more. I've invited some of the former members of the alt.books.cs-lewis newsgroup to join us there. For those interested mainly in the works of Charles Williams rather than the other Inklings, there is a Charles Williams list called Coinherence-L.

There are also several web sites for book lovers to keep track of their books and make contact with others with similar interests. Three of the best-known are Bibliophil, LibraryThing and Good Reads. For various reasons I prefer Good Reads.

Good Reads

GoodReads is a combination of a book catalogue and a social networking site for books, and I think it works better than the others.

Like most social networking sites, you can add people as "friends", but in many social networks this is rendered useless by people wanting to add you as a "friend" when they don't know you, don't want to know you, share no common interests with you and you've never heard of them. It's a bit like regarding everyone in the phone book as a "friend" -- if everyone is your friend, then no one is.

But Good Reads provides a good way of seeing whether someone is likely to be your friend.

First you need to join, and enter some of the books that you have in your library or have read, starting with your favourites, but you can also add a few books that you really hate. Like other such sites, you are asked to rate and review them. When you've entered those books and rated them (with 1-5 stars), then you can look for friends. Find someone who owns some of your favourite books, look at their profile and click "compare books".

There you can see if they've read your favourite books, and what they think of them. It's expressed as a percentage. For example, with one of my friends (who sometimes reads my blog), it produced this result:

You and booklady have 21 books (or 7.27% of your library and 2.07% of her library) in common. Your tastes for those 21 ratings are 78% similar.

If it's over 70%, go to the next step, which is the "book compatibility test". This compares your ratings of some popular books in various genres, or if you've even read them. In this case my result was "Your compatibility with booklady is 63%."

If you have read some of those popular books, but haven't entered them and rated them, then do so, because it will make future comparisons easier.

So Good Reads is a good way to find and keep in touch with those with similar literary tastes.

Last week I went to the Amahoro Gathering at Hekpoort, about 40 miles west of Pretoria. About 250 people gathered from various countries in Africa and there were a few from other countries as well.

"Amahoro" is a word in Rwandan languages meaning "peace", and I think it was chosen to represent the rebuilding needed in that country following the horrific genocidal strife that took place there 15 years ago. The gathering was billed as "empowering emerging leaders", so perhaps I shouldn't have been there at all, not really being a leader, and at my age I'm submerging rather than emerging.

Much of it was about what it means to be Christian in a postmodern and postcolonial world. I won't say much about it here -- I've blogged about that in my other blog, where it is also easier to put pictures. But it was useful, because words like "postcolonial" have often been bandied about and I wasn't too sure what they meant, and I think I now have a better idea.

For some of the younger people there it was a lifechanging experience, and if you're interested in reading about it, here are links to some of the blog posts on it, including mine.

• Andries Louw (Christian) of nextchurch on Amahoro Africa Family reunion of change agents
• Andries Louw (Christian) of nextchurch on Amahoro Africa conference The African Reformation
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of my contemplations on cant speak about Amahoro
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of my contemplations on I am an Afrikaner, I owe my being to this continent
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of my contemplations on Adriaan Vlok got his feet washed @ Amahoro
• Cobus van Wyngaard (Christian) of Anderkant on ons Afrikaner private godsdiens (aka oom Adriaan part 2)
• Cori (Undefined) of Cori’s Blog on A diverse God
• nic paton (TBD) of soundandsilence on The European Post Colonial
• Roger Saner (Grew up Baptist, went Anglican, now post-church.) of FutureChurch on The drive home from Amahoro
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Amahoro Gathering 8 June 2009
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Truth, reconciliation and smelly feet
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on More on Amahoro
• Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Amahoro: modernity fights back

If you have posted a blog post about the Amahoro Gathering and would like to add it to this list, please click here to see how to do it. You are welcome to copy this list to the end of your post.

Also, Technorati seems to be working again, so you can find more blog posts on the topic here.

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A whodunit set in Stalin's USSR, with echoes of Orwell's 1984, Koestler's Darkness at noon and Brink's A dry white season.

Generally well written, with a couple of annoying lapses (the misuse of "substitute" in a couple of places, for example).

Could the hero, Leo Demidov, be entering a career as a new fictional detective to follow? If so, this is where it all began.

View all my reviews.

There were a couple of things i wondered about as i was reading, though. How does the author know all this stuff? How authentic is it?

I don't suppose there are many people still alive with first-hand memories of the Stalin era, though the book is set right at the end of it, in 1953. I was 12 years old then, but don't remember too much of the political currents of the time. But the author is the same age as my sons, who can't remember all that much of the apartheid era, which ended much more recently.

I also wonder if this could be the beginning of the career of a new fictional detective, like Arkady Renko, Kurt Wallander, Vicount Lynley, Adam Dalgleish, Inspector Morse et al.

My first friend on LJ was seraphimsigrist, who was the one who invited me to join LJ over seven years ago, and is still my friend. He writes on an amazing variety of topics, some of which are of of more interest to me than others, but they are always worth reading.

We had met on Coinherence-l, a mailing list for discussion and application of the works and ideas of Charles Williams. Charles Williams (1886-1945) was a writer of books, plays, and poetry; he was a Christian, as well as a friend and Oxford collegue of C.S.Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. His novels and poetry were respected by such diverse people as T.S.Eliot, Lewis, and W.H.Auden. The mailing list continues to flourish, and is moderated by pyegar.

I was away most of last week.

After the Divine Liturgy at St Nicholas of Japan Orthodox Church in Brixton, Johannesburg, I set off for Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal, and spent a couple of nights with my cousin and her husband, Jenny and John Aitchison. I hadn't seen Jenny for about 8 years, so it was good to see her again.

John and I compared notes in our police files from the apartheid era -- we are working on an article on the attitudes and roles of the Security Police in a surveillance society, as fevealed in their correspondence with the Department of Justice about the two of us. We hope, eventually, to publish it in a historical journal.

Then I went to a conference at the African Enterprise centre in Pietermaritzburg, which I have described more fully, with pictures, here. There I met several old friends, and made some new ones. The conference was about chapter 17 of St John's Gospel, and a planned book on "The church Jesus prayed for".

On the way home on Friday I met another old friend in Ladysmith, Rod Smith, who had previously been rector of the Anglican parish of Ladysmith, and is now a full-time social worker.