Author: Anthony Ephirim-Donkor
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498521231
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
There is a divine pronouncement among the Akan that all human beings are children of God (Nana Nyame), none a child of the earth (mother); meaning that human beings are spiritual in origin, descending directly from God via the Abosom (gods and goddesses). Every person then has a deity as father (Ᾱgya-bosom), recognition of which existentially enables a person to fulfil one’s career or professional blueprint (Nkrabea). Intrinsically, therefore, human beings embody the very essence of the Abosom, which manifests itself behaviorally and psychologically in a manner identical to those of the gods and goddesses. African Personality and Spirituality: The Role of Abosom and Human Essence therefore addresses ultimate existential concerns of the Akan, revealing the essence of the primeval gods and goddesses and how they transform themselves into human beings, as well as the psychology of personality characteristic attributes, the phenomenon of spirit alightment, and other manifestations of the gods and goddesses, and the imperative of ethical existence and generativity (Ↄbra bᴐ) as basis of eternal life.
Author: Anthony Ephirim-Donkor
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761872612
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
Using the Akan in Ghana as a paradigmatic African representative group, African Spirituality: On Becoming Ancestors, Third Edition offers a unique African developmental praxis to eternal life immortality. Indeed, this way of life is predicated on the awareness and application of certain intrinsic values, which, if followed, lead to eternal life. As a way of living, African spirituality begins when an individual becomes morally and ethically responsible for one’s own actions while engaged on an ethical path (Ɔbra Bↄ) in pursuance of one’s unique career endeavor (Nkrabea). Though an individual quest, society is, however, the arbiter of one’s ethical and moral life, when society confers on the person adjudged a success the stage title of Nana. At old age, Ɔbra Bↄ ends as an active endeavor. However, as repositories of wisdom, senior elders continue to inculcate in succeeding generations the principles, art, and mastery of ideal life (Ɔbra pa). Then upon death, senior elders are transformed into deities, bequeathing to living descendants names worthy of evocation and worship. Indeed, this book is the first study of its kind to draw on the experiences of an entire people, their psychological dispositions and effects on the Akan during adulthood. Thus, this book brings a unique perspective to the study of spirituality, religion, developmental psychological theory, what it means to achieve perfection as an elder on earth, and upon death join the esteemed company of the Nananom Nsamanfo (Ancestors).
Author: Anthony Ephirim-Donkor
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761853294
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
African religion is ancestor worship; that is, funeral preparations, burial of the dead with ceremony and pomp, belief in eternal existence of souls of the dead as ancestors, periodic remembrance of ancestors, and belief that they influence the affairs of their living descendants. Whether called Akw?sidai, Homowo, Voodoo, Nyant?r (Aboakyir), CandomblZ, or Santeria in Africa or the African Diaspora, ancestor worship centers on the ancestors and deities. This makes it a tenably viable religion, because living descendants are genetically linked to their ancestors. The author, a traditional king and professor, studies the Akan in Ghana to demonstrate that ancestor worship is as pragmatic, systematic, theological, teleological, soteriological — with a highly trained clerical body and elders as mediators — and symbolic as any other religion in the world. Ancestor worship follows prescribed rites and rituals, formulas, precepts for ritual efficacy, and festivities of honor with music and dances to provoke ancestors and deities into joining in the celebration.
Author: Magesa Laurenti
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 1608333213
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
"It is not for you to call profane what God counts clean."
Did Christianity replace traditional African religion with the arrival of European missionaries in past centuries? Or did sub-Saharan African cultures persist in maintaining their religious worldviews even after accepting the salvific message of Christianity? In this compelling book, Laurenti Magesa argues that despite missionary Christiaity's refusal to acknowledge the worth of traditional African religious culture. the incarnational spirituality of those cultures remains vibrant and visible today, and has much to offer and teach other cultures, both Christian and not.
Author: Jacob Kẹhinde Olupona
Publisher: Herder & Herder
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
As Africa moves into the 21st century it faces new spiritual, social, and economic challenges.
Author: Carol P. Marsh-Lockett
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739181424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
With a focus on the connected spiritual legacy of the black Atlantic, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art. With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, this collection reveals and examines their shared spiritual cosmology. Diasporic in scope, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers new readings of black literatures through the prism of spiritual memory that survived the damaging impact of trans-Atlantic slaving. This memory is a significant thread that has often been missed in the reading and teaching of the literatures of the African diaspora. Essays in this collection explore unique black angles of seeing and ways of knowing that characterize African spiritual presence and influence in trans-Atlantic black artistic productions. Essays exploring works ranging from turn-of-the-century African American figure W.E.B. DuBois, South African novelist Zakes Mda, Haitian novelists Edwidge Danticat and Jacques Roumain, as well as African belief systems such as Voudoun and Candomble, provide a scope not yet offered in a single published volume. This collection explores the deep and often unconscious spiritual and psychosocial connectedness of people of African descent in the African and Ameri-Atlantic world.
Author: Jacob K. Olupona
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199790582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
This book connects traditional religions to the thriving religious activity in Africa today.
Author: Anthony Ephirim-Donkor
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761868453
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
This edition updates the scholarship on ancestor worship—with the addition of three new chapters. Beginning with Akan theology and ending with sacrifices, the study examines Akan conception of God, the abosom (gods and goddesses) relative to creation, centrality of the ancestors’ stool as the ultimate religious symbol housing the soul of the Akan, and organized annual propitiatory festivities carried out among the Akan in honor of the ancestors (Nananom Nsamanfo) and abosom. The book, therefore, serves as an invaluable resource for those interested in the phenomenon of African religion, because it provides real insight into ancestor worship in ways that are meaningful, practical, systematic, and as a way of life by an Akan Traditional ruler (Ↄdikro) and a professor of Africana studies.
Author: Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 1608331008
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
An intriguing introduction to Christian doctrine from an African perspective. Using a framework of excerpts from Chinua Achebe's well-known novel, Things Fall Apart, the author introduces the major themes of Christian doctrine: God, Trinity, creation, grace and sin, Jesus Christ, church, Mary, the saints, inculturation, and spirituality. While explaining basic Christian beliefs, Theology Brewed in an African Pot also clarifies the differences between an African view of religion and a more Eurocentric understanding of religion. Very accessible and engaging, each of the eleven short chapters ends with three discussion questions followed by one or two African prayers.
Author: Ikechukwu Anthony Kanu
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1546296670
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
This notwithstanding, over the years, the African culture in all its manifestations became the bulls eye for attack especially during the Atlantic Slave Trade, Colonialism, Racism. During these periods, Europe dealt coup de grace to the African personality, to his is-ness, by destroying the African cultural values. They disrespected African peculiarities, languages enriched with traditions of centuries, parables, many of them the quintessence of family and national histories; modes of thought, influenced more or less by local circumstances, local poetry which reveals the profundity of African literary wizardry. A lot of these were altered against the background that the African in all his susceptibilities is an inferior race and that it is needful to give him a foreign model beacon to emulate and follow. In our time of globalization, bringing about a new sweep of changes on the African cultural values, a more careful, historically grounded interpretation of the cultural changes occurring on the continent is, therefore, needed and for it to be useful, it should enable us to transcend the narrow and narrowing parameters that currently dominate the discourse on the processes and structures of change occurring in contemporary Africa. This piece is a great accomplishment by African scholars to do a grounded hermeneutics of the structures of changes taking place in Africa. The different chapters are the fruits of the 2018 International Conference of the Association for the Promotion of African Studies (APAS). The authors, like artists, combine originality with insightful imagination. They have carefully treated the historical, conceptual, basic and substantive issues in cultural change in Africa. Their coherent, systematic and encyclopedic approaches have the capacity to expand the intellectual and professional horizon of its readers.
