By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 13, 2024
If Jesus returned to this earth, what form would he take; what region would he go to; and where would he live? We know that he was born in a manger, the humblest of all dwellings, but would he reappear in the pomp and regality of a king, the self-importance and arrogance of a prime-minister, or the swagger and manipulative power of a financier?
Continue reading If Jesus Returned to this Earth
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 26, 2023
There was a large picture of Jesus at the entrance of our home when I grew up in Tacarigua. In this picture, Jesus’ skin was white, his hair was blonde, and his eyes were a piercing blue. This represented the saviour who is supposed to save us from our sins and prepare us to enter into the heavenly kingdom. This depiction of Jesus was a Western whitewashing of history.
Continue reading Dreaming of a Black Christmas
By Raffique Shah
December 26, 2023
There is a kind of universality about Christmas that makes it impossible to ignore what it means to more than 30% of the world’s population whose spiritualism is anchored in Christianity. Christmas, whether its story is fiction or fact, remains a religious beacon to fewer people in contrast to the expanding populations across the world. There is no evidence, too, that Christianity maintains a leading position when the religions of the world are assessed on their impact on global affairs.
Continue reading Never leave out the ham
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 28, 2023
On November 11, Raphael Dwamena, a Ghanaian footballer, collapsed and died during an Egnatia’s soccer game against Partizani in a tiny town in Albania. He was 28 years old and a renowned football star. Dwamena was the top scorer for his Albanian team and enjoyed a certain amount of success with them. This season he was the leading scorer in the Albanian league.
Continue reading The Grandeur of Men and Women
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 24, 2023
PART II
Philip Henry Douglin, grandfather of Bishop Rawle Douglin, took up his clerical duties at the St Clement’s Parish, St Madeleine, in 1887. Coming out of a slave past, having done missionary work in Africa and having been associated with some of the distinguished scholar missionaries of his day, Douglin was very conscious of Africa’s place in the world and the problems that beset his people.
Continue reading The esteemed ancestry of Bishop Rawle Douglin
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 17, 2023
PART I
Two weeks ago I announced that I was taking a four-month hiatus from this column to concentrate on completing Two Caribbean Preachers. I did not know I would be back to these pages again so quickly. As fate would have it, Philip Douglin, grandfather of Rawle Douglin, is one of the preachers I am writing about. Sadly, Rawle Douglin, former bishop of T&T, passed away on Thursday, April 6.
Continue reading The esteemed ancestry of Bishop Rawle Douglin
By Raffique Shah
April 10, 2023
I believe it was the night before Holy Thursday, listening to news on radio or television, I paid attention up to when the announcer counted past seven murders. They might have been over a period longer than 24 hours. They might even have been less than the full day’s score. What did it matter? I asked myself—and continued doing whatever I was doing.
Continue reading Has God Forsaken Us?
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 03, 2023
I am disappointed I did not join with my brothers and sisters to celebrate Spiritual Shouter Baptist Liberation Day at Couva on Thursday. Try as I may, I could not find out what was being done to honour those who had fought so hard to realise themselves in a foreign land.
Spiritual Baptist Day is important to me. My aunt, Lenora O’Brien, born on November 13, 1895, was never afraid of practising her faith publicly. She rang her bell and proceeded towards the Tacarigua River on Sunday mornings as she and her fellow congregants proclaimed their faith.
Continue reading Renewal and revival on Spiritual Baptist Day
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 18, 2022
In 1970 while I was a faculty member at Fordham University, New York, I taught a course on the development of Afro-American literature. One of the books I used was William Wells Brown, Clotel or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, published in England in 1853.
The novel told the story of Clotel, a daughter of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who fathered three children by his slave, Sally Hemmings. Although the white power structure denied this incident for two centuries, in November 1998 the truth of this claim was authenticated by DNA evidence.
Continue reading The Slave Bible
By Dr Kwame Nantambu
December 24, 2021
As the US House of Representatives Select Committee continues to issue subpoenas to former president Donald John Trump’s advisers and allies in regard to the endemic dynamics of the historic, violent insurrection on the nation’s capital on January 6; plus the stark legal reality that on November 12, a federal grand jury “indicted” one of the former president’s advisers, Steve Bannon, “on two counts of contempt of Congress”; and as a sidebar, as of this writing, 32 “non-related sentences (have been) handed down so far” in cases filed by Justice Department prosecutors; ergo, it is a sine qua non to expose the gut danger of cult personality leaders: Jim Jones’ “Jonestown massacre” in Guyana on November 18, 1978, v Donald John Trump’s putatively inspired, violent insurrection on the nation’s capital in Washington DC, USA, on January 6.
Continue reading Exposing the danger of cult leaders