South Africa is a complex society filled with diversity of many kinds. Because of the enormous and profound changes of the last 20 years of democracy, this can be perceived as a society in social identity crisis which is increasingly spilling over into many areas of life. Churches have also gone through a process of reformulating their identity and have restructured theological education for all its members resulting in growing multicultural student bodies. These new student constituencies reflect a wide spectrum (...) of cultural backgrounds, personal histories and theological commitments, and represent diversity in race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, age, language and sexual orientation. These issues of diversity are theologically complicated and contested as they are attached to religious dogma. Diversity exists as a threat and promise, problem and possibility. Using current conceptualisations of diversity in South African Higher Education this article will seek to understand the notion of diversity and difference and the possibility of developing transformative remedies within the theological education curriculum. (shrink)

How should we think of development within an ideological format in which individual subjects are abstracted from the constraints and necessities of social policy and the political structure? Using this question as a spark, this article critically deconstructs the Pentecostal prosperity gospel in Africa. Two overlapping arguments are advanced. One is that, in atomising the individual, Pentecostal prosperity gospel discounts power relations and the political, effectively dislocating the individual believer from the social matrix within which his or her agency is (...) forged. Secondly, it is suggested that this attitude towards both the individual and the state puts Pentecostalism firmly within the orbit of neoliberalism. This article leverages this affinity for an understanding of how neoliberal ideas and conceptions of wealth, accumulation and self-actualisation are embedded and reproduced in Pentecostalism. It concludes that, because, on the one hand, it has no lever – historical or philosophical – on which it might be grounded, and on the other hand, since it has developed no cogent political economy to speak of, prosperity gospel, nay Pentecostal spirituality, offers no realistic path out of the African economic crisis. (shrink)