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Reflections from Holy Week and a Study Trip to Cape Town and Stellenbosch During Holy Week, my thoughts return to our study trip to South Africa earlier this year. It was a journey filled with learning, beauty, and contrast. South Africa is a country of striking contrasts – visually stunning yet socially complex. Our course […]

I found it very important to learn about Robben Island and its historical significance as a place of oppression, where those deemed “undesirable” were kept away from the rest of the population. But what I really appreciated was hearing a first-hand account that reminded me once again that evils of apartheid are still a part […]

If you have learned how South Africans fought against the atrocities of their oppressors and that apartheid and racial segregation were abolished in South Africa, you might be excited to learn what such connotations mean to South Africans. I spent two weeks in Cape Town observing, learning, getting first-hand information from South Africans, and visiting […]

Despite the common ground, the name of the Valley of Grace, they are continents apart. Despite being continents apart, they belong to the same earth. Despite the common earth, there are differences, different perspectives and understandings. How do we reach out to the other side, how do we encounter something so different and yet so […]

A few days into our trip, on January 25th, the sun was high in the sky. It was a beautiful and warm day. We were in Cape Town with our group and had visited Robben Island and enjoyed a wine tasting at Groot Constantia earlier in the day. Now we had some free time, and […]

During our stay in South Africa, we had the opportunity to experience a great variety of places and meet people with different expertise and backgrounds. When asked to write a short blog post about one of our experiences, I found it difficult to choose just one from all that we encountered. However, the one I […]

Throughout my trip to South Africa, I had many moments where I was surprised or impressed. The first day when we arrived in Cape Town, half of the group decided to visit the Kristenbosch National Botanical Garden. Kristenbosch is one of the largest botanical gardens in the world with over 7,000 different plants and flowers. […]

The course “Abraham goes global” gave me a unique opportunity to experience how different communities on opposite sides of the globe worship God and cultivate their faith. The discussions, both the ones included in the program and the informal ones, gave me a deeper understanding of what interfaith dialogue is or what it could be […]

A workshop Rethinking the holy materiality: bones and other ”stuff”, with and without reliquaries (the Middles Ages and Beyond) September 10–11, 2025 Venue: University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Call for Papers While much has been published on relics, their understanding remains restricted and inflexible because of the prevalent definitions of the […]