Singapore is a city state that sits at the crossroad of East and West, a major transportation hub and a global financial center. So, it is not surprising that Singapore was one of the first countries to report cases of COVID-19. Initially, Singapore contained the virus well; the aftermath of the 2003 SARS outbreak prompted the government to have extensive plans in place.
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Facing and Re-Imagining Ourselves in the Era of Coronavirus
Continue ReadingThen Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’”And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says.And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?
Luke 18:1-8
Creation, Liberation Theology, and COVID-19
My colleague Steve de Gruchy,1Steve taught in the School of Theology and Religion at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. He drowned in 2010 during a rafting trip on the Mooi River. Steve’s death while with his family on a holiday adventure is a tragedy; it is also a reflection of his passion to live exuberantly. Steve’s channeled this passion with a keen awareness that exuberance was not the same as extravagance and his deep, abiding commitment to a Biblically informed social justice grounded every part of his life and career. His contributions to the field of religion and public health remain (though God only knows what else he would have produced) and he is missed. in 2009, wrote a theological paper entitled, “Dealing With Our Own Sewage.”2Steve de Gruchy, “Dealing With Our Own Sewage: Spirituality and Ethics in the Sustainability Agenda,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 134 (July 2009): 53-65. I periodically teach this paper in my classes in the study of religion and public health because it offers students in public health, religious studies, and theological studies (the students I teach) a glimpse of a rich theological reflection, drawing on insight from liberation theology, on a pressing ecological crisis—access to adequate, clean water.
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