Download or read book Christianity Politics and Public Life in Kenya written by Paul Gifford and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since independence in 1963, Kenya has been a classic personalised patronage state, run by a corrupt elite for its own benefit, as became tragically evident in December 2007's stolen election and its aftermath. Kenya is also said to be 80 percent Christian. Under the bland label 'Kenyan Christianity', several different overlapping realities can be distinguished, and it is these which Gifford investigates in this book, relating them to the country's politics and public life. The politically engaged form that challenged the dysfunctional one-party state in the early 1990s is given due prominence, but Gifford contends that today the mainline churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are marked less by such political engagement than by their involvement in development, in which foreign missionaries and global networks play a huge role. The theology of Kenya's mainline churches is consciously focused on African culture, as a non-negotiable foundation, and the Catholic church has an additional agenda - to Africanise its religious congregations. Kenya is also noted for its rich variety of African indigenous Churches, all originating in a defence of Kenyan cultures, while in recent decades countless Pentecostal churches have also sprung up. They range from affluent middle class churches to refuges for the poor, but nearly all are characterised by a stress on power, success, achievement and prosperity that prioritises modernity rather than traditional culture. Gifford discusses their deployment of the media, crusades, organisation, theology and use of the Bible, and above all the economics that has made this phenomenon possible. Yet another distinct form is an enchanted Christianity in which demons or spiritual forces are deemed responsible for almost everything

Download or read book Kenyan Christian Queer written by Adriaan van Klinken and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular narratives cite religion as the driving force behind homophobia in Africa, portraying Christianity and LGBT expression as incompatible. Without denying Christianity’s contribution to the stigma, discrimination, and exclusion of same-sex-attracted and gender-variant people on the continent, Adriaan van Klinken presents an alternative narrative, foregrounding the ways in which religion also appears as a critical site of LGBT activism. Taking up the notion of “arts of resistance,” Kenyan, Christian, Queer presents four case studies of grassroots LGBT activism through artistic and creative expressions—including the literary and cultural work of Binyavanga Wainaina, the “Same Love” music video produced by gay gospel musician George Barasa, the Stories of Our Lives anthology project, and the LGBT-affirming Cosmopolitan Affirming Church. Through these case studies, Van Klinken demonstrates how Kenyan traditions, black African identities, and Christian beliefs and practices are being navigated, appropriated, and transformed in order to allow for queer Kenyan Christian imaginations. Transdisciplinary in scope and poignantly intimate in tone, Kenyan, Christian, Queer opens up critical avenues for rethinking the nature and future of the relationship between Christianity and queer activism in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa.

Download or read book Music in Kenyan Christianity written by Jean Ngoya Kidula and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The book contains an excellent mix of deep personal understanding of the culture and copious documentation.” —Eric Charry, Wesleyan University This sensitive study is a historical, cultural, and musical exploration of Christian religious music among the Logooli of Western Kenya. It describes how new musical styles developed through contact with popular radio and other media from abroad and became markers of the Logooli identity and culture. Jean Ngoya Kidula narrates this history of a community through music and religious expression in local, national, and global settings. The book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website. “The archival and ethnographic research is outstanding, the accounts of mission history, and then the musical explanations of a variety of forms of change that have accompanied mission intervention, the incursion of forms of modernity, and globalization at large are compelling and unparalleled.” —Carol Muller, University of Pennsylvania “Explores contemporary African music through the prism of ethnographies through the people’s engagement of Christianity as a unifying ideology in the context of history, modernity, nationalisms and globalisation.” —Journal of Modern African Studies “The meticulous and sometimes highly sophisticated musical analyses, transcriptions, and the rich historical and ethnographic perspectives illuminate not only ongoing discourses and contestations of syncretism and related analytical notions, they also represent a plausible model of a balanced approach to ethnomusicology.” ?International Journal of African Historical Studies “An essential text for thinking about world Christianities, because it approaches a particular African Christianity from both insider and outsider perspectives.” —Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith

Download or read book The African Church and COVID 19 written by Martin Munyao and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-01-21 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The African Church and COVID-19: Human Security, the Church, and Society in Kenya is a bold and incisive look at the African Church in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the book, contributors explore how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragilities of African society as well as the weaknesses in the Church’s role in helping and serving African communities. The African Church and COVID-19 analyzes the question of how the Church in Kenya should move forward in a post-COVID-19 era to address the vulnerabilities of socio-economic and political structures in Africa.

Download or read book A Spirit of Revitalization written by Associate Researcher Kyama M Mugambi and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid development, overtaken older forms of Christianity represented by historic missionary efforts. Similarly, African Christianity has largely displayed its rootedness in its social and cultural context. The story of Pentecostal movements in urban Kenya captures both remarkable trends. Individual accounts of churches and their leaders shed light on rich and diverse commonalities among generations of Kenya's Christian communities. Exploring the movements' religious visions in urban Africa, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya highlights antecedent movements set against their historical, social, economic, and political contexts. Kyama Mugambi examines how, in their translation of the Gospel, innovative leaders synthesized new expressions of faith from elements of their historical and contemporary contexts. The sum of their experiences historically charts the remarkable journey of innovation, curation, and revision that attends to the process of translation and conversion in Christian history. While outlining a century of successive renewal movements in Kenya between 1920 and 2020, the study also delves into features of recent urban Pentecostal churches. Readers will find a thorough historical treatment of themes such as church structures, corporate vision, Christian formation, and theological education. The longitudinal and comparative analysis shows how these Pentecostal approaches to orality, kinship, and integrated spirituality inform Kenyans' reimagination of Christianity. --Emma Wild-Wood, Senior Lecturer in African Christianity and African Indigenous Religions and Director of Postgraduate Studies, University of Edinburgh

Download or read book Christianity Among the Nomads written by Paolo Tablino and published by Paulines Publications Africa. This book was released on 2004 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics written by Nic Cheeseman and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics provides a comprehensive and comparative overview of the Kenyan political system as well as an insightful account of Kenyan history from 1930 to the present day.

Download or read book The Street Is My Pulpit written by Mwenda Ntarangwi and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-05-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To some, Christianity and hip hop seem antithetical. Not so in Kenya. There, the music of Julius Owino, aka Juliani, blends faith and beats into a potent hip hop gospel aimed at a youth culture hungry for answers spiritual, material, and otherwise. Mwenda Ntarangwi explores the Kenyan hip hop scene through the lens of Juliani's life and career. A born-again Christian, Juliani produces work highlighting the tensions between hip hop's forceful self-expression and a pious approach to public life, even while contesting the basic presumptions of both. In The Street Is My Pulpit, Ntarangwi forges an uncommon collaboration with his subject that offers insights into Juliani's art and goals even as Ntarangwi explores his own religious experience and subjective identity as an ethnographer. What emerges is an original contribution to the scholarship on hip hop's global impact and a passionate study of the music's role in shaping new ways of being Christian in Africa.

Download or read book Christianity and Social Change in Contemporary Africa Volume One written by B. Nyamnjoh and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2020-05-25 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together seven empirically grounded contributions by African social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds. The authors explore the social impact of religious innovation and competition in present day Africa. They represent a selection from an interdisciplinary initiative that made 23 research grants for theologians and social scientists to study Christianity and social change in contemporary Africa. These contributions focus on a variety of dynamics in contemporary African religion (mostly Christianity), including gender, health and healing, social media, entrepreneurship, and inter-religious borrowing and accommodation. The volume seeks to enhance understanding of religions vital presence and power in contemporary Africa. It reveals problems as well as possibilities, notably some ethical concerns and psychological maladies that arise in some of these new movements, notably neo-Pentecostal and militant fundamentalist groups. Yet the contributions do not fixate on African problems and victimization. Instead, they explore sources of African creativity, resiliency and agency. The book calls on scholars of religion and religiosity in Africa to invest new conceptual and methodological energy in understanding what it means to be actively religious in Africa today.

Download or read book African Christianity written by Paul Gifford and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-22 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These detailed analyses of the state of the churches in each country suggest more general patterns operating widely across sub-Saharan Africa.

Download or read book Faith in African Lived Christianity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith in African Lived Christianity – Bridging Anthropological and Theological Perspectives offers a comprehensive, empirically rich and interdisciplinary approach to the study of faith in African Christianity. The book brings together anthropology and theology in the study of how faith and religious experiences shape the understanding of social life in Africa. The volume is a collection of chapters by prominent Africanist theologians, anthropologists and social scientists, who take people’s faith as their starting point and analyze it in a contextually sensitive way. It covers discussions of positionality in the study of African Christianity, interdisciplinary methods and approaches and a number of case studies on political, social and ecological aspects of African Christian spirituality.

Download or read book Women of Fire and Spirit written by Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book East African Expressions of Christianity written by Thomas T. Spear and published by James Currey Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history examines, through case studies, the ways in which African chatechists, evangelists and translators have interpreted Christianity for themselves and conveyed it to others. It analyses African prophetic and healing movements which drew on African and Christian traditions. North America: Ohio U Press; Tanzania: Mkuki na Nyota; Kenya: EAEP

Download or read book The Akorino Church in Kenya written by Solomon Wachira Waigwa and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work provides an historical and theological analysis of the Akorino Church, showing that although it is not connected historically or theologically to the Azusa street revival, it exhibits beliefs and practices that are authentically Pentecostal and essentially African.

Download or read book Christianity in Kenya written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Muslims in Kenyan Politics written by Hassan J. Ndzovu and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muslims in Kenyan Politics explores the changing relationship between Muslims and the state in Kenya from precolonial times to the present, culminating in the radicalization of a section of the Muslim population in recent decades. The politicization of Islam in Kenya is deeply connected with the sense of marginalization that shapes Muslims’ understanding of Kenyan politics and government policies. Kenya’s Muslim population comprises ethnic Arabs, Indians, and black Africans, and its status has varied historically. Under British rule, an imposed racial hierarchy affected Muslims particularly, thwarting the development of a united political voice. Drawing on a broad range of interviews and historical research, Ndzovu presents a nuanced picture of political associations during the postcolonial period and explores the role of Kenyan Muslims as political actors.

Download or read book Kenya in Motion 2000 2020 written by and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: