The Laughter of Providence - Stories from A Life on the Margins
By Harold Turner
- Subject
- New Zealand / General
- Publisher
- Deep Sight Publishing
- Published
- June 6, 2001
- Pages
- 160
- Format
- Paperback
- ISBN
- 9780958201247
About this book
The book's title derives from a friend's remark that "if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." Harold Turner's plans for a quiet academic existence in England must have left Providence smiling in view of these quite unexpected encounters in store for him.
A long life of teaching and travel has brought the author into unsought relationships with religious groups being harassed or persecuted within Western societies.
Surprisingly, the 20th century has been the great century of religious persecution. We deplore this elsewhere, but don't want to know about it in our own allegedly tolerant countries.
These autobiographical stories tell o personal involvement in helping to defeat attacks by the British and the European Parliaments. Other stories move from Moral Rearmament in the 1930s to working with a Rastafarian Member of the New Zealand Parliament on legal issues raised by the killing of a Rastafarian leader.
The author's research on African independent churches aided their transition from rejection to acceptance by the mainline churches. The little-known and complex story of the rise and fall of apartheid among the Afrikaner Churches in South Africa was gathered during his policy of bridge-building rather than boycotting.
We have here an unusual case study for the DeepSight Trust's critique of Western Culture.
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