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  • Hekima Review No. 48 (May 2013)

    The theme for this edition of Hekima Review hinges on two points: faith, on one hand, and the contemporary secular society, on the other. The point on contemporary secular society is about the context in which we live. The notion of faith is an essential matter for reflection. Our decision to foreground the notion of faith finds its inspiration from three happenings: the proclamation of the Year of Faith by Pope Benedict XVI; the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council; and the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. 

  • Hekima Review No. 47 (Dec 2012)

    Anthony De Mello, the Indian Jesuit mystic, in his Wake Up video, tells a story of a man whose beard was on fire while the man was praying. The people around shouted to him, Mr! Mr! Your beard is on fire; your beard is on fire! The man laughed and replied; don’t you see me praying for rain? This is the irony of religion despite its power to perceive violence it can also conceal within itself the paralyzing fear, ignorance, and unfathomable stupidity to do nothing while the whole world is on fire. 

  • Hekima Review No. 46 (May 2012)

    On the 20th of November, 2011, in Cotonou, Benin Republic, Pope Benedict XVI presented Africae Munus, the Second Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Church in Africa in Service of Reconciliation, Justice and Peace. The “Second Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Africa” took place in Rome from 4 to 25 October 2009. Africa Munus or Africa’s Commitment, as it is translated, builds on the first synod for Africa, Ecclesia in Africa. In this document, the model of the Church as a “Family of God” (EA#14) emphasized the evangelical mission of the African Church in the face of despair and discouragement. The Synod fathers dealt with a fundamental question, “What is it and what [the Church] must fully carry out, so that its message may be relevant and credible?” (EA #21). “In a Continent full of bad news, what is the Christian message ‘Good News’ for our people? 

  • Hekima Review No. 45 (Dec 2011)

    More often than not, great changes in human history have ensued from the unconscious dialogue of an individual human being with the great historical forces that have been in motion for perhaps centuries before his or her birth. The individual in question crystallizes the aspirations of his or her contemporaries and voices them, channeling as it were their spiritual energy, sparking off a movement bigger than the idiosyncrasies that initially set him or her in motion. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation on 17 December 2010 catalyzed the Tunisian Revolution and the wider Arab Spring. The manifesto of Stephan Hessel, former French diplomat, entitled Indignez-vous!, has much to do with the birth of movements such as the Spanish indignados, the French indignés, the Portuguese movement Geração à rasca, Occupy Wall Street in the United States, Y’en a marre in Senegal and a host of other movements across the globe which strive to humanize our world.

  • Hekima Review No. 44 (May 2011)

    For centuries, biological differences between men and women have been the determining factor in the ascription of social roles. Women’s biological capacity for childbirth and breastfeeding and their general lesser physical strength have been used to confine them to domestic chores and the upbringing of children. Supposedly ruled by emotion and judged less reasonable than men, they have been deemed unfit to participate in politics, for example, and ostracised from large areas of the public arena. More often than not, decision-making has been seen as the sole prerogative of men. Even in many of the so-called democratic nations, the right of women to vote and to run for office is hardly a century old. As it stands, this biological determinism or social Darwinism has often been applied to the detriment of women, whose lot has largely been an oppressed and restricted form of life. Taken from this perspective, the feminization of the gender discourse is justifiable.

  • Hekima Review No. 43 (Dec 2010)

    In 1987, I witnessed a serious disturbance to the quiet and ordinary life of the rural community where I was born. The community went on an all-out war with the rainmaker. The community had requested him to make rain so that the farming cycle could begin. But he could not, and could not explain why. So, the women of the community moved into the rainmaker’s homestead and cooked all the food in his barn. The saga developed over three months, and life was never the same since the drought of that year: all the able-bodied people could no longer live on farming; they had to find an alternative source of livelihood. Of course, neither the drought nor the disruption of life it occasioned made it into world news headlines. The disturbance was ‘insignificant’ to draw the attention of the media, and nobody would have made money ‘representing’ either party to the conflict in a court of law. But it has got me thinking about the environment for the past twenty years.

  • Hekima Review No. 42 (May 2010)

    At a time when the world and the church are short of reasons for celebration, here is a candidate: I invite you to celebrate the priesthood in this “Year for Priests.” I recommend that we applaud especially those who are in the ministerial priesthood because, in our contemporary African society, they are like the “Fiddler on Roof” who has to balance precariously different facets of his life. Do you remember the movie with that title? In the movie, the protagonist, Tevye, is an archetypal symbol of the tension in the meeting of two cultures, western civilization as industrialization and the Jewish culture as tradition. The “invading” Western culture is daring, aggressive, and too sophisticated to be ignored. The Jewish traditions, ingrained in the cultural life of the village of Anatevka in general and in Tevye in particular, seem ill-equipped to adequately confront it. 

  • Hekima Review No. 41 (Dec 2009)

    Fifteen years after the first Synod for Africa, the “Second Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Africa” took place in Rome from 4 to 25 October 2009. This event of the Catholic Church in Africa, considered a “New Pentecost,” constituted the climax of a process that started earlier. It is the late Pope John Paul II who first announced it in November 2003. And in June 2005 Pope Benedict XVI convoked it. The theme of this Second Synod for Africa was “The Church in Africa in Service to Reconciliation, Justice and Peace.” Around two hundred bishops from Africa and Madagascar, together with twenty other bishops from other continents, priests, religious, and lay delegates constituted this special ecclesial assembly for Africa over three weeks in the Vatican. 

  • Hekima Review No. 40 (May 2009)

    Famous in the Gospel of Luke is the so-called “Jesus manifesto,” in Lk 4:18-19. In this scene, we see Jesus in the temple of his home town Nazareth, on the Sabbath day, reading and applying to himself the following passage of the Prophet Isaiah (Is 61:1-2): “The spirit of the Lord is on me, for he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord.” Announcing liberation and consolation for the poor, liberty for the captives and the oppressed, recovery of sight to the blind, Jesus proclaims also, at the end of this passage, “a year of favor from the Lord,” a Jubilee year!

  • Hekima Review No. 39 (Dec 2008)

    Many of us are familiar with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), a humanitarian organization created in 1971 by a small group of French doctors. Their conviction is that all people have the right to medical care regardless of their race, nationality, religious affiliation, or political persuasion. The needs of people, this organization holds, transcend national borders. Our increasingly global world is proving them right: the wind of economic recession is blowing across the whole world, leaving no region untouched; the election of Barak Obama to the presidency of the United States of America was a historical earthquake whose seismic waves were felt in every part of the globe. The erstwhile obscure Mama Sara Onyango (Obama’s paternal grandmother) of an equally obscure Kogelo village in Kenya’s Siaya District, has since rocketed to the status of a celebrity. An event transpiring thousands of miles away has transformed her life. Various television stations also beamed images of hordes of men and women from various parts of the world enthralled by joyful hope mediated by the landmark development in the United States.

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