Southern African Dominican

This book was originally published in 2017 to commemorate the centenary of the Dominican friars presence in South Africa. They arrived in the mining towns of Boksburg, Brakpan and Springs. Coming from a different milieu in England, they found it difficult to fit in. They chose not to get involved with the racial and social animosities, the labour unrest and even the socio-economic factors that led eventually to an apartheid government. Instead they focused on the task of building up parishes. The social situation they encountered led to frustration. Personal relationships between them deteriorated and most of the first group returned overseas unhappy or ill. It was only after 1925 with the arrival of more friars, that the work of building not just churches, but of living communities of priest and people, could begin. It was due to the persistence of two men, Bede Jarrett and Lawrence Shapcote, that the mission survived at all. This is a reprint of the 2017 book and is the first in a newly established Southern African Dominican Series published in the ATF Africa imprint of ATF Press Publishing Group. The book includes a Foreword by the Vice-Provincial of the Dominican Friars of Southern Africa in 2017, Stanslaus Muyebe OP

My aim in this book is to show clearly that the ... Dominican tradition ... is capable of shedding light on the questions of men and women today and suggesting a way of dealing with them. These questions are ultimately a variant of the one central question of human existence, bound up with a particular time, place and person: the question of a good and meaningful life ... my starting point is the basic conviction that a religious and dedicated life cannot be lived anywhere else than in the midst of our turbulent culture, which constantly makes us uncertain ... this book is deliberately written from the perspective of someone who in ecclesiastical jargon is called a "lay person".' From the Introduction by Erik Borgman 'This book is a highly attractive and stimulating exposition of Dominican spirituality by Erik Borgman, a Dutch Lay Dominican. The central intuition of the book is that Dominican spirituality is founded on the encounter of God in all of human experience. Dominic's experience in the early thirteenth century was born in opposition to Catharism, which maintained that God was remote from us and that there was a fundamental opposition between the divine and this material world. But for Dominic it is here, in our lives, with all their creativity and goodness, their mess and confusion, that God is to be found. Our mission as preachers pushes us "to enter the unrest of the street and the inn, politics and journalism, welfare, teaching and science, in the belief that the holy, the traces of the Holy One, are to be found there". Even in the most difficult situations, when all is dark, God is waiting to be discovered. "If Dominican spirituality has a core, then it would be this insight into the unexpected and unheard-of nearness of God'. This is the good news that the Order of Preachers was founded to preach and the source of the happiness of the preacher."' From the Foreword by Timothy Radcliffe OP

Sixty years ago the Second Vatican Council inaugurated what would be a sea change in the way Christians prayer, not only in the Catholic communion, but across Western Christianity. The intervening decades have seen some steps forward, some sticking points, and new challenges to common prayer. In this issue of the Australian Journal of Liturgy, Jenny O'Brien addresses one of those sticking points, the place of women in liturgical ministry. Joseph Grayland addresses the intersection of Christian liturgy and the climate crisis in conversation with Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical Laudato Si'. On the practical side, Nathan Nettleton reflects on several years of "online only" services in his own congregation, while Bryan Cones addresses presiding informed by the post-conciliar recovery of the assembly as the primary actor in the liturgy.