Unexpected calls to prayer from mosques in Turkey caught many off guard on the night of the attempted coup. An ethnomusicologist explains the political and social power of sound.
The Trump campaign is adding groups of untapped, swing state voters to its Trump playbook. A political scientist examines whether the Amish vote in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio can be swung.
Bob Marley is one of those rare artists who continues to touch the hearts of millions of people across the world, even though he died more than three decades ago.
During the 1980s, press coverage of South African family murders suggested that something was ‘wrong’ with white society – and with the white Afrikaans men who were usually seen as perpetrators.
Legislating against racial and religious vilification is highly fraught, as the ongoing debate around Section 18C has demonstrated, and unlikely to become less so any time soon.
Whether it’s Hillary Clinton’s courting the UFO vote or Donald Trump’s lending credibility to various conspiracy theories, the “triumph of reason” seems to have gone by the wayside.
Religious conversion sometimes has the added bonus of upward social mobility. But for many in South Africa’s Indian community it had the opposite effect.
Since the 1920s Pentecostal churches have had a major impact in South Africa’s Indian community. Their converts have grown larger than all the other Christian denominations put together.
For Muslims generally, as for conservative Christians, homosexual acts are sinful. Christian gays and lesbians have had to work hard for a measure of recognition among fellow-believers; their Muslim counterparts are just beginning that struggle.
Not only is the Australian Christian Lobby losing relevance, it has had to appeal to Bill Shorten to pay attention to the group in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
Director of the Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Policy & Associate Professor, New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity