This was the last class in the 3rd year course of Christianity and Culture; the conclusion of the three years of a Bible course that started with an overview of the Old and New Testaments and continued with exegesis, hermeneutics and doctrine. We looked at definitions of culture and then described and evaluated aspects of culture. The students wrote a paper to describe and evaluate, from a Christian perspective, an aspect of their culture – either specifically tribal or more generally Congolese. They covered a wide range of subjects: hunting, clothing, marriage, dowry, leadership, meaning of names, sorcery, causes of sickness, greetings, hospitality, death and the after life, education, the role of women, eating, traditional belief about the gods, the treatment of guests. Two things struck me: how much the students tend towards using the OT than the NT as biblical evidence, and how much the spirits inhabit these cultures at every level. Something so foreign to the scientific, closed universe of the western world view.

Double spacing was used from the typewriter days when text was fixed spaced. Since the full stop (period) took the same space as a capital M it wasn’t necessarily clear as to the end of a line. So too with a comma etc. Obviously now that typewriters are in the museum and most of us use word processors, all text is now proportionally spaced, so putting a double space after a full stop is no longer relevant!

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