Author: Randee Ijatuyi-Morphé
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761862684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 647
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Book Description
This well-crafted book probes the key dimensions of Africa’s existential predicament. It constitutes an intellectual response to a gnawing “African situation”—the starting point for grasping Africa’s social and religious quest. Beyond split explanations of external versus internal factors (e.g., colonization/slavery vs. leadership/cultural values), this study accounts more comprehensively for emergent issues shaping this situation. The situation reflects a gamut of problems in traditional African religion and material culture, which hitherto defines African communality, polities, and destinies vis-à-vis the cosmos and nature. Thus, African religion and communities, each with its own attendant values, do not operate by critical engagement with larger issues of society and civilization, especially those shaped by the advent of (post-) modernity. Rather, they operate via adaptation. The communal drive for natural and social harmony inevitably produces a preservationist view of culture (“leaving things as they are”). This study takes an integrative approach to religion, society, and civilization; eschews dichotomies; and broadly defines and re-signifies life and wholeness as a true end of Africans’ quest today.
Author: Randee O. Ijatuyi-Morphi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 646
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Book Description
Author: Messay Kebede
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042008106
Category : Decolonization
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This book discovers freedom in the colonial idea of African primitiveness. As human transcendence, freedom escapes the drawbacks of otherness, as defended by ethnophilosophy, while exposing the idiosyncratic inspiration of Eurocentric universalism. Decolonization calls for the reconnection with freedom, that is, with myth-making understood as the inaugural act of cultural pluralism. The cultural condition of modernization emerges when the return to the past deploys the future.
Author: Peter J. Paris
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451415865
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Eminent black social ethicist Peter Paris focuses on African "spirituality"--the religious and moral values pervading traditional African religious worldviews. Paris's careful scholarship and his eye for value in varying cultural milieus combine to model comparative cultural analysis and to clarify cultural foundations of black ethical life.
Author: Stan Chu Ilo
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498561284
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
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.
Author: Adriaan van Klinken
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197644155
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
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.
Author: Paul Bowers
Publisher: Langham Publishing
ISBN: 1783684453
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 980
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Book Description
This reference collection presents academic reviews of more than twelve-hundred contemporary Africa-related publications relevant for informed Christian reflection in and about Africa. The collection is based on the review journal BookNotes for Africa, a specialist resource dedicated to bringing to notice such publications, and furnishing them with a one-paragraph description and evaluation. Now assembled here for the first time is the entire collection of reviews through the first thirty issues of the journal’s history. The core intention, both of the journal and of this compilation, is to encourage and to facilitate informed Christian reflection and engagement in Africa, through a thoughtful encounter with the published intellectual life of the continent. Reviews have been provided by a team of more than one hundred contributors drawn from throughout Africa and overseas. The books and other media selected for review represent a broad cross-section of interests and issues, of personalities and interpretations, including the secular as well as the religious. The collection will be of special interest to academic scholars, theological educators, libraries, ministry leaders, and specialist researchers in Africa and throughout the world, but will also engage any reader looking for a convenient resource relating to modern Africa and Christian presence there.
Author: Molefi Kete Asante
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135013497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419
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Book Description
There is a paradox about Africa: it remains a subject that attracts considerable attention yet rarely is there a full appreciation of its complexity. African historiography has typically consisted of writing Africa for Europe—instead of writing Africa for itself, as itself, from its own perspectives. The History of Africa redresses this by letting the perspectives of Africans themselves take center stage. Authoritative and comprehensive, this book provides a wide-ranging history of Africa from earliest prehistory to the present day—using the cultural, social, political, and economic lenses of Africa as instruments to illuminate the ordinary lives of Africans. The result is a fresh survey that includes a wealth of indigenous ideas, African concepts, and traditional outlooks that have escaped the writing of African history in the West. The new edition includes information on the Arab Spring, the rise of FrancAfrica, the presence of the Chinese in Africa, and the birth of South Sudan. The chapters go up to the present day, addressing US President Barack Obama's policies toward Africa. A new companion website provides students and scholars of Africa with access to a wealth of supporting resources for each chapter, including images, video and audio clips, and links to sites for further research. This straightforward, illustrated, and factual text allows the reader to access the major developments, personalities, and events on the African continent. This groundbreaking survey is an indispensable guide to African history.
Author: Robert M. Torrance
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520920163
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 387
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Book Description
Robert Torrance's wide-ranging, innovative study argues that the spiritual quest is rooted in our biological, psychological, linguistic, and social nature. The quest is not, as most have believed, a rare mystical experience, but a frequent expression of our most basic human impulses. Shaman and scientist, medium and poet, prophet and philosopher, all venture forth in quest of visionary truths to transform and renew the world. Yet Torrance is not trying to reduce the quest to an "archetype" or "monomyth." Instead, he presents the full diversity of the quest in the myths and religious practices of tribal peoples throughout the world, from Oceania to India, Africa, Siberia, and especially the Americas. In theorizing about the quest, Torrance draws on thinkers as diverse as Bergson and Piaget, van Gennep and Turner, Pierce and Popper, Freud, Darwin, and Chomsky. This is a book that will expand our knowledge—and awareness—of a fundamental human activity in all its fascinating complexity.
Author: Robert Priest
Publisher: Langham Publishing
ISBN: 1783687517
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
Do you wish you had a better understanding of the issues and questions African Christians face as they seek to live out their faith in their cultural context? Do you wonder how Africans themselves frame these questions and their answers? Would you like access to actual research that can confirm your own experience or bring new information to your attention that would deepen and broaden your understanding? This unique book, the product of a multiyear study and survey sponsored by the Tyndale House Foundation, offers insights into all these questions and more. Featuring input from over 8,000 African survey participants and 57 in-depth interviews, it provides invaluable insight and concise analysis of the dynamics of the development of African Christian leaders today. For more information about the study project visit www.africaleadershipstudy.org.
