Southland Culture Revisited
I grew up in Southland, at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island, but have not lived there since 1985. First years were spent in rural Central Southland, and I came back to Invercargill to take on a youth worker position after four years at Otago University. Now I’m back for a family reunion over the weekend. The experience so far hasn’t been disappointing. The weather has delivered the so familiar cold south westerly with occasional showers. The temperature today reached 15 degrees, slightly warmer than the top of 10 earlier this week. The friendliness of the place is solid, heard in the tooting of horns as people see their friends and family driving by. Despite the

Practical and Pastoral Theology in Dunedin
It just so happened that my visit to Dunedin this week coincided with the two-day Practical and Pastoral Theology conference hosted by Lynne Baab at the University of Otago. Unfortunately I was only able to get to two of the presentations, on the Tuesday afternoon. Bruce Hamill, a Presbyterian minister who trained at Knox Theological Hall a year behind me, presented his paper, “Some impractical thoughts on practices implied in taking theosis seriously in the 21st century Protestant west”. Bruce is firmly planted within the systematic theology stream and did his best to adhere to the

Two Degrees of Separation in NZ
There’s a theory that there’s only six degrees of separation between people around the world. Want to get a message or a parcel to someone anywhere in the world, you should be able to manage it by using personal connections. In New Zealand it’s more like two degrees of separation, a fact I put to the test this weekend. I spent an hour with friends in Kaikoura yesterday. My daughter left her handbag there, a fact we didn’t discover until arriving in Christchurch, two hours later. I rang up Ralph and Ruth to check that the bag was there. I then rang up Rob, my wife’s brother in Kaikoura, to ask if he knew of anyone coming down to Christchurch today. Ind

Two Days in Wellington
I’m in New Zealand for 11 days, travelling from Wellington to Invercargill to attend a family get together. So I’m Postkiwi rediscovering the Kiwi part of me. I recently saw a truck with the saying, “Life is like a book. People who don’t travel spend their lives on one page.” Being back in New Zealand is a bit like going back to read a chapter of life, seeing everything with fresh eyes, and discovering what has changed. I flew from Brisbane to Wellington yesterday on Air New Zealand, the first time for a while I’ve been on the airline. It was an enjoyable experience. It was fascinating to see the

Becoming a Facebook Fan
I feel slightly uncomfortable with the idea of setting up a personal fan page on Facebook. It seems a little arrogant to send out a message saying, “Duncan became a fan of Duncan Macleod and suggests you become one too.” And yet that’s the way you’ve got to go if you want to start up a Fan page on Facebook, unless you get your minions to do all the inviting. Promoting your work online requires you to get over your worries about inflated ego. After all, writing a blog assumes that someone somewhere reads what you write and feels OK about it. Writing an annual Christmas letter, perhaps, is the real precursor to the personal Fan page, providing an update on all the a