Download or read book Christianity and the African Imagination written by David Maxwell and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-08-08 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the twentieth-century, Christendom shifted its centre of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere, Africa becoming the most significant area of church growth. This volume explores Christianity’s advance across the continent, and its capturing of the African imagination. From the medieval Catholic Kingdom of Kongo to a transnational Pentecostal movement in post-colonial Zimbabwe, the chapters explore how African agents – priests and prophets, martyrs and missionaries, evangelists and catechists – have seized Christianity and made it theirs. Emphasizing popular religion, the book shows how the Christian ideas and texts, practices and symbols, which have been adapted by Africans, help them accept existential passions and empower them through faith to deal with material concerns for health and wealth, and to overcome evil.

Download or read book Christianity and the African Imagination written by Aylward Shorter and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Christianity and the African imagination written by Aylward Shorter and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Christian Imagination written by Willie James Jennings and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentation-social, spatial, and racial-that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals. Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race. Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.

Download or read book Christianity and the African Imagination written by Aylward Shorter and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Christianity and the African Imagination written by Aylward Shorter (sac.) and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa written by Adriaan van Klinken and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is often seen as a conservative force in contemporary Africa. In particular, Christian beliefs and actors are usually depicted as driving the opposition to homosexuality and LGBTI rights in African societies. This book nuances that picture, by drawing attention to discourses emerging in Africa itself that engage with religion, specifically Christianity, in progressive and innovative ways--in support of sexual diversity and the quest for justice for LGBTI people. The authors show not only that African Christian traditions harbor strong potential for countering conservative anti-LGBTI dynamics; but also that this potential has already begun to be realized, by various thinkers, activists and movements across the continent. Their ten case studies document how leading African writers are reimagining Christian thought; how several Christian-inspired groups are transforming religious practice; and how African cultural production creatively appropriates Christian beliefs and symbols. In short, the book explores Christianity as a major resource for a liberating imagination and politics of sexuality and social justice in Africa today. Foregrounding African agency and progressive religious thought, this highly original intervention counterbalances our knowledge of secular approaches to LGBTI rights in Africa, and powerfully decolonizes queer theory, theology and politics.

Download or read book A Future for Africa written by Emmanuel M. Katongole and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil war, famine, genocide, AIDS--the peoples of Africa have endured horrific human tragedies. Those crises plus widespread economic, political, and social instability have combined to produce what some consider a dire and nearly hopeless situation. Even as this book was going to press, the leaders of the G-8 nations were meeting to talk about what could be done to "aid Africa" in these critical times. A careful look at history would indicate that the answer must come from within Africa and from the African people themselves, not from other nations or the economic programs and solutions they propose. The rapid rise of a Christian social ethics movement as an alternative perspective focused precisely on addressing Africa's challenges using the spiritual resources of its own people is providing a hopeful solution and a timely and powerful coping mechanism for African peoples. One of the leaders of this movement is Emmanuel Katongole, a Catholic priest from Uganda. In A Future for Africa, Katongole wrestles with concrete problems like the AIDS epidemic and widespread military conflicts, as well as fundamental, systemic ones, like poverty, corruption, and tribalism. He then offers faith-filled solutions based on the power and example of Christian community and Christian moral imagination. Katongole's radical message is that a political ethic based on Christian principles as taught in the Scriptures is the necessary foundation for healing, reconciliation, and rebuilding the continent.

Download or read book The Holy Spirit and Salvation in African Christian Theology written by David Tonghou Ngong and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revision of author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Baylor University, 2007 under title: The material in salvific discourse: a study of two Christian perspectives.

Download or read book A History of Christianity in Africa written by Elizabeth Isichei and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isichei's thorough study surveys the full breadth of Christianity in Africa, from the early story of Egyptian Christianity to the churches of the Middle Years (1500-1800) to the prolific success of missions throughout the 1900s. This important book fills a conspicuous void of scholarly works on Africa's Christian history. Includes 26 maps.

Download or read book Wealth Health and Hope in African Christian Religion written by Stan Chu Ilo and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wealth, Health, and Hope in African Christian Religion offers a portrait of how contending narratives of modernity in both church and society play out in Africa today through the agency of African Christian religion. It explores the identity and features of African Christian religion and the cultural forces driving the momentum of Christian expansion in Africa, as well as how these factors are shaping a new African social imagination, especially in providing answers to the most challenging questions about poverty, wealth, health, human, and cosmic flourishing. It offers the academy a good road map for interpreting African Christian religious beliefs and practices today and into the future.

Download or read book The Corporeal Imagination written by Patricia Cox Miller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.

Download or read book Triumphs of the imagination written by Leland Ryken and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Kwame Bediako written by Tim Hartman and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako presses all Christians to question their own theological commitments. He does so by rethinking Christian identity in light of cultural identity and the shortcomings of colonialism. Bediako's quest to be both African and Christian informs what it means to be Christian in a secularized Europe and North America. Far more than just chronological and biographical, Tim Hartman's analysis of the arc of Bediako's theology demonstrates that Bediako's vision of Christianity as a non-Western religion allows it to serve as a resource for World Christianity amid the exponential growth of Christianity in the Global South. Hartman points to how Bediako sidesteps the influence of Western thought by rooting African Christianity in a twin heritage of pre-Christendom patristic theology and precolonial traditional religious practices of Africa. Bediako expands the canon of theological resources available for Christians by eliminating the distinction between gospel and culture. Since there is no such thing as a pure theology for Bediako, culture itself becomes a source of divine revelation through the incarnation. Hartman's study of Bediako helpfully corrects inaccurate portrayals of African Christianity. The growth of African Christianity should not be feared, nor mischaracterized as narrow-minded or too conservative. Bediako asserts a polycentric understanding of the Christian faith based in grassroots theologies and the beliefs of actual Christians. While Bediako agrees that Christianity in Africa (and the Global South) is the future of the Christian faith, he rejects assumptions that the Christian faith needs to be yoked to political power. Instead, Bediako offers an alternative understanding of politics based on democracy and nondominating power. Both Bediako and the book offer a way forward in thinking about questions of religious pluralism. African Christianity has never known cultural hegemony as African Christians have always lived with Islam and African traditional religions. Bediako offers a theology of "Jesus is Lord" while appreciating the integrity of Islam and traditional African religions. In the end, the book presents an African Christian theologian who values--and does not simply reject--African traditional religions. Bediako believed that traditional African religions, far from being demonic, served as evangelical preparation for the Christian faith and as the substructure of African Christianity, and that African religious imagination was the foundation for the Christian faith worldwide. As Hartman shows, the more distinctively African Bediako's Christianity became, the more suited that theology became for the world.

Download or read book Bwiti written by J. W. Fernandez and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We cannot, the author argues, adequately understand the religious imagination without knowing the historical, social, and cultural matrices from which it arises. Accordingly, his book explores the Fang culture of Gabon as a set of contexts from which emerges the Bwiti religion. In addition to experience with missionary Christianity, Bwiti uses a great reservoir of images and ideas from its own past. Professor Fernandez analyszes how they are recreated into a compelling religious universe, an equatorial microcosm. Part I, a detailed ethnographic account of Fang culture after colonial encounter, addresses the attendant problems. The author discusses the European influence on the self-concept of the Fang, family life and kinship, and political and economic relationships. Part II analyzes in greater detail the religious implications of European administration and missionary efforts. In Part III the author shows how the malaise and increasing isolation of part of Fang culture achieve some assuagement of the Bwiti religion, which seeks a reconciliation of the past and present. James W. Fernandez is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and author of many studies in this discipline. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Shoutin in the Fire written by Danté Stewart and published by Convergent Books. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stirring meditation of being Black and learning to love in a loveless, anti-Black world “Only once in a lifetime do we come across a writer like Danté Stewart, so young and yet so masterful with the pen. This work is a thing to make dungeons shake and hearts thunder.”—Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of The Prophets In Shoutin’ in the Fire, Danté Stewart gives breathtaking language to his reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy—both the kind that hangs over our country and the kind that is internalized on a molecular level. Stewart uses his personal experiences as a vehicle to reclaim and reimagine spiritual virtues like rage, resilience, and remembrance—and explores how these virtues might function as a work of love against an unjust, unloving world. In 2016, Stewart was a rising leader at the predominantly white evangelical church he and his family were attending in Augusta, Georgia. Like many young church leaders, Stewart was thrilled at the prospect of growing his voice and influence within the community, and he was excited to break barriers as the church’s first Black preacher. But when Donald Trump began his campaign, so began the unearthing. Stewart started overhearing talk in the pews—comments ranging from microaggressions to outright hostility toward Black Americans. As this violence began to reveal itself en masse, Stewart quickly found himself isolated amid a people unraveled; this community of faith became the place where he and his family now found themselves most alone. This set Stewart on a journey—first out of the white church and then into a liberating pursuit of faith—by looking to the wisdom of the saints that have come before, including James H. Cone, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and by heeding the paradoxical humility of Jesus himself. This sharply observed journey is an intimate meditation on coming of age in a time of terror. Stewart reveals the profound faith he discovered even after experiencing the violence of the American church: a faith that loves Blackness; speaks truth to pain and trauma; and pursues a truer, realer kind of love than the kind we’re taught, a love that sets us free.

Download or read book African Christian Feminist written by Hinga, Teresia and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For two decades Teresia Hinga has been a leading voice in the fields of African Christianity, women in African theology, and gender and ethics in the African context. Now, African, Christian, Feminist brings together Hinga's own selections from her extensive body of work, a number of them not previously published. A valuable resource for scholars and students alike, African, Christian, Feminist reveals the depth and breadth of a unique voice in theology, ethics, and gender and African studies"--