Rethinking Christian Identity: African Reflections from Pauline Writings

Despite its existence for over a century in Africa and statistics putting the Christian populations at average 80 percent mostly in sub-Saharan African countries, Christianity has not managed to provide an alternative identity to ethnicity as issues of identity continue dogging the continent. Many African societies remain divided and at war on the basis of identities, be they racial, tribal, creedal, gender, class, language or other identities. Surprisingly, this state of affairs is also found even within the precincts of the church. Many churches remain divided along racial, ethnic, tribal, and other identities. One does not need to look far and wide to acknowledge this reality. Does Christianity have an identity? Could the writings of Paul address the issues of Christian identity? Or do the writings address this problem at all? These are the questions at the heart of this paper. Making use of Pauline texts such as Galatians 3:28 and scholarly works such as those of Buell and Hodge (2004:237), I discuss Paul’s understanding of Christian identity and its implications for Christian identity in Africa today.

Finite involution semigroups with infinite irredundant bases of identities

A basis of identities for an algebra is

A NEW METHOD IN THE FINITE BASIS PROBLEM WITH APPLICATIONS TO RANK 2 TRANSFORMATION SEMIGROUPS

We prove that the semigroup of all transformations of a 3-element set with rank at most 2 does not have a finite basis of identities. This gives a negative answer to a question of Shevrin and Volkov. It is worthwhile to notice that the semigroup of transformations with rank at most 2 of an n-element set, where n > 4, has a finite basis of identities. A new method of constructing finite non-finitely based semigroups is developed.