"When you begin to think outside the box, you often become some other "leaders" lousy follower. That usually costs something" (Andy Rayner)

"Our guardian angels are bored." (Mike Foster)

It's where I feel I'm at these days. “In the second half of life, it is good just to be a part of the general dance. We do not have to stand out, make defining moves, or be better than anyone else on the dance floor. Life is more participatory than assertive, and there is no need for strong or further self-definition” (Falling Upward. Richard Rohr.120).

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Ethnocentrism & Cultural Snobbery!

"....years before the arrival of the first European missionaries in 1848 in south Pacific, William Gill (1856) claimed:

"As you approach the miserable-looking beings, you cannot suppress the emotions of loathing and disgust which involuntary arise in your mind [sic]. Their naked painted forms; their faces besmeared with a pigment of black - lead; their eyes bloodshot with heathen excitement, ...their hands expert in blood-shed, and even while you talk with them, wielding a club, or spear, or bow or arrow, watching an unguarded moment, by the blow of death, to make your body and property their own. ………………"

Giving his ideas of their family housing, he questioned whether

"…..such an assembly of degraded beings may be called a family, ...huddled together in those wretched hovels, without any sense of shame, without any regard to propriety. Alas! the wretchedness, the abomination of such beings."

(Quoted in Missiology October 2002, pg 466 Article by John Hitchen "Relations between Missiology and Anthropology)

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