Switching Gears after a Long Break

It's been a year and a quarter since my last post. Things got too wild for me. Felt pressured to complete the last volume of my 8-volume series on Christian-Muslim relations. For details, go to my < www.SocialTheology.com/Islamica.html >. I did get it completed after close to ten good years, a lot of dollars that I was surprised to be able to muster, several computers and printers and 2700+ pages. You can purchase them from me, from the publisher, from Amazon and their ilk. You can also access it free of charge as e-books from < www.lulu.com >. Yes, free of charge! Just peck "janhboer" there and you will find them, all eight of them. The archives that emerged from this project are now lodged at Yale University.

After completion, I had to spend more time on getting the Nigerian side of the publication in place and I continue to be busy with that. Nigeria? you ask. Well, yes, my wife and I spent 30 years there. This series has ramifications for the entire world with its Christians and Muslims, but its primary focus is on Nigeria as a detailed case study of its 60 million plus of both Christians and Muslims. The place is a virtual laboratory of how these two religions can co-exist in relative peace.

Relative peace. I don't think you can expect more than that, if for no other reason than that they tend to have such opposite views about the functions of government. In addition to that, they have such different views on the nature and function of religion as well as on freedom of religion, that achieving anything more than relative peace may be asking for too much. But that is a whole lot better than what they have today, each with a knife at each other's throat. My series has a number of purposes, but the main one is to provide especially my fellow Christians there with more wholistic parameters so they can better understand the Muslim challenge and thus better respond to it.

OK, you got me going on a favourite subject of mine. Sorry. But you will hear more of that in the future, I am sure.

My early posts deal with some Christian foundational issues in the form of meditations on Genesis. These will remain foundational to my future writings. I will occasionally return to those subjects, but most likely in response to current events on which I intend to comment. Comment, not proclaim. Modern culture is too complicated to have many fixed ideas about almost anything of significance. Often my comments are going to be in the nature of scattering the seed for you to join me in the search for greater clarity. I am always interested in arriving at some Christian conclusion to issues, provisional conclusions, even if during the search I may sound dogmatic at times.

So, you cannot expect a consistent ongoing series of posts on a single subject for the immediate future. I am going to respond in a Christian spirit to events or to writers as they happen or write, without pretending to have the last Christian wisdom and I'm going to do this from a contemporary Calvinist point of view. If you stick with me, you will slowly discover what such an exotic perspective might look like. Yes, there is such a perspective and it is alive and well in Canada and many other countries. You might be surprised at the organizations and institutions it has fostered. It is active and working and making a difference, but often without flying the Calvinist flag, so that people do not recognize it even as they benefit from it.

This, then, is my re-introduction of my good self. I hope that in time you will draw your friends to this blog and join me in conversation. Till next time--inshallah!