itself completely against the stone wall of rationalist modernism nor entirely absorb itself into the sponge of relativist post-modernism. There is no doubt that it was influenced by the base-truth assumptions of these eras, but those who retained faith nonetheless could never deal entirely with, respectively, the "firmity" or the "infirmity" of these two cultural phases. The truths of both these "worlds" were just too severe.It is these broad cultural-philosophical understandings that have also influenced matters related to religiosity in South Africa over the ages. These will not be traced here (for general overviews of South African history, cf. e.g. Davenport & Saunders 2000, Giliomee 2003, Thompson 2010; related to religion, cf. e.g. De Gruchy & De Gruchy 2005, Sundkler & Steed 2000, Hofmeyr & Pillay 1994), but they do form the context of our time and place and of aspects of the currently changing South African theological landscape indicated here. The fact that we do find ourselves at a kind of cultural-philosophical cusp should be seen as the first characteristic of the time in which we find ourselves at present. In some respects, this placement will reverberate in what is touched on below. Contextuality/liberation as theological heart, but not art. An academic inclination (trend 2)If the South African society had to be diagnosed, broadly, it would have a doctor worried. Apart from the country's economy (cf. e.g. Du Plessis & Smit 2007) and daily interpersonal relations in the urban areas, which are in good health, almost all the other aspects of society are faltering. South Africa still houses a traumatised society even though the popular expectations around 1994 (the year of the change from white rule to black democratic rule that has been much idealised) had been very different. Crime and corruption in government and the police service and the broader society, a crumbling road, water and electricity infrastructure, failing courts and correctional services, disastrous education policies and practices, unemployment at a regularly estimated rate of between 25% and 40% (depending on what exactly is measured), and the country topping world scales of murder, rape and HIV/Aids rates (cf. Faber 2009 for a brief overview), all add up to a country with a poor prognosis.In one way, these strains can be understood as the natural by-product of a society going through massive societal adjustments; the country has been hit with major changes over the past quarter of a century, of which only two already indicate the dramatic extent of such changes: The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had a direct impact on the way the remaining apartheid policies in South Africa were set aside in favour of a transition to democracy, which publicly started in February 1990 and culminated just more than four years later in the April 1994 elections (cf. Lombaard 2009a:89-93); The 1994 transition from white minority to black majority rule, apart from the most obvious racial parity, also mediated via the 1992 Constitution worldwide trends towards other equalities and urgencies, namely of gender, sexuality, ecology, and such matters. (The open society imagined in this Constitution is