The story of Moore Town, located in the Blue and John Crow Mountains of eastern Jamaica, is steeped in Maroon history and heritage.The Maroons in Jamaica resisted and escaped from slavery, an institution of plantation servitude perpetuated by...
Published:Thursday | January 19, 2017 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
The story goes that Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea, but it is Nazareth that he is commonly associated with. In the New Testament, the city is described as the childhood home of Jesus, thus Jesus Christ of Nazareth. However, some modern...
One of the grave human tragedies of World War II in Europe between 1939 and 1945 was the Holocaust. In what is known as Germany's Hitler's 'Final Solution', the tyrannical Fuhrer instructed his soldiers to exterminate Jews and other minorities.To...
Published:Thursday | January 12, 2017 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
There are many songs about the 'man from Galilee'. That man is called Jesus, which some people believe is the figment of someone's imagination. But, to Christians the world over, he is real, the Messiah sent by God to save the world from sin.He is...
Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel:Jerusalem, a hilly composite of the ancient and the ultra-modern, may be the spiritual, religious, historical, and administrative capital of Israel, and Tel Aviv-Yafo, a pulsating Mediterranean seaside municipality, is the...
Religious Jews participate in rituals of birth, marriage and death, and observe harvest festival and holy days. For instance, on the first Sabbath following birth, a baby-naming ceremony (Simchat Bat) is held for a girl. At this ceremony, the father...
Published:Wednesday | December 28, 2016 | 9:13 PMPaul H. Williams
The stories of the origins of Judaism, one of the world's major monotheistic religions, are many, and Jews, the observers of Judaism, differ even among themselves when it was firmly established as a significant religious faith. It is the major...
Published:Thursday | December 22, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
Judaism is one of the major religions in the world, and is usually referenced as the world's first monotheistic religion. There is a belief in only one God, the same one that other religions believe in.Thus, Jews do not believe in the concept of the...
Published:Thursday | December 15, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
BEIT BERL, Israel:It is a matter of land, the decades-old dispute between the Palestinians and the Israelis, especially since the Jewish state of Israel was established in 1948 on lands which each side claims belong to it.The disputed territory,...
Published:Thursday | December 8, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
By the end of the Six-Day War of 1967 the Israelis had occupied Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Three years later, Anwar Sadat replaced Gamal Abdel Nasser as Egypt's president. He wanted the United States to persuade its ally,...
It was December 1976, a period of intense political tribalism and violence in Jamaica. Things really got out of hand as the leaders of the two major political parties had lost control of the situation.To bring back the love and unity, reggae icon...
When Diana Cooper-Clark was a little girl living on Swallowfield Avenue in St Andrew, she was a "voracious" reader. One day when she ran out of books, she randomly selected one of her father's and went into her yard to read under a lignum vitae tree...
Jamaica has a long and colourful social and political history that is documented in diverse places. But the history of the island's flora (plants) and fauna (animals), some of which are endemic, is much longer. And one institution that is preserving...
Published:Thursday | November 17, 2016 | 9:41 PMPaul H. Williams
Ten thousand dollars was what patrons paid to participate in Farm to Table, held at Orange Hall Estates in St Ann on Sunday, November 6. This is much money by many standards, but it was not so much for the vast array of food and drinks that was...
Published:Thursday | November 10, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
This time around it is a drum. About 20 feet long, it has to be the longest in Jamaica, and perhaps in all of the Caribbean. And it is not just a gigantic showpiece, it is functional as was demonstrated on Sunday, November 6, after it was unveiled...
Published:Thursday | November 10, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
The region in the Middle East encompassing Israel, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, etc, are places that are mentioned in the Bible, Christendom's Holy book. According to Christians, Jesus Christ was the messiah...
Inner-city Spanish Town community. The dark lanes and the 'dead yard' were busy. It was the wake for the community activist who was killed in broad daylight by the area don, 'Jim Bum'. Nobody in the community had seen Jim Bum since then.People were...
Published:Thursday | October 27, 2016 | 10:23 AMPaul H. Williams
The Pentecostal movement grew out of the need for some members of Protestant Christian churches to see holiness demonstrated in the established churches whose focus was on material and financial attainments.The reverence, sanctity, and Pentecostal...
Published:Thursday | October 20, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
From October 13 to17, National Hero Marcus Mosiah Garvey (Andre Bernard) was resurrected by four ancestral spirits, led by Olo (Shana-Kaye Burns) and cast on to the stage at the Philip Sherlock Centre for The Creative Arts in Garvey The Musical...
In an extension of its 2016 concert season, The Jamaican Folk Singers will have a benefit performance to raise funds to assist some students with their tuition fees. This will be held at The University Chapel on the Mona campus of The University of...
Published:Thursday | October 20, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
Pentecostalism, which gathered speed in the USA at the beginning of the 20th Century, is a Protestant Christian denomination that has grown faster than any other over the past century, particularly in the USA and the Caribbean. The term Pentecostal...
Published:Thursday | October 13, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
In the Pentecostal church, the preaching, singing and dancing are spirited, demonstrating a sort of exhilaration that is absent from many other Christian denominations.The praise and worship sessions are equally fervent, and people speak in tongues...
Published:Thursday | September 22, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
Traditionally, African peoples believe in a supreme being who is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent, and who is manifested in nature and natural phenomena.They are aware of their spirituality, and the relationship between themselves and this...
Published:Thursday | September 8, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
For millennia, African peoples have associated nature and natural phenomena with a supreme being (God) or divinities. Nature to them is God, and God is nature. That is the essence of their religious existence. And because of this notion, they have...
Published:Thursday | September 1, 2016 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams
Last week, in a veiled comparison between African traditional religions and Christianity, which is the major religion in Jamaica, some of the key elements of African traditional religions were discussed using Kenya-born Professor John S. Mbiti, a...
