Africa's Social and Religious Quest
Africa's Social and Religious Quest

Author: Randee Ijatuyi-Morphé

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2014-01-30

Total Pages: 647

ISBN-13: 0761862684

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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.

The Spirituality of African Peoples
The Spirituality of African Peoples

Author: Peter J. Paris

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published:

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9781451415865

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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.

Africa's Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization
Africa's Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization

Author: Messay Kebede

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9789042008106

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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.

The Spiritual Quest
The Spiritual Quest

Author: Robert M. Torrance

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0520920163

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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.

Christian Reflection in Africa
Christian Reflection in Africa

Author: Paul Bowers

Publisher: Langham Publishing

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 980

ISBN-13: 1783684453

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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.

Searching for Zion
Searching for Zion

Author: Emily Raboteau

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2013-01-08

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 080219379X

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From Jerusalem to Ghana to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, a woman reclaims her history in a “beautifully written and thought-provoking” memoir (Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King and Zeitoun). A biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, Emily Raboteau never felt at home in America. As the daughter of an African American religious historian, she understood the Promised Land as the spiritual realm black people yearned for. But while visiting Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. More surprising was the story of how they got there. Inspired by their exodus, her question for them is the same one she keeps asking herself: have you found the home you’re looking for? In this American Book Award–winning inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement, Raboteau embarked on a ten-year journey around the globe and back in time to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of black Zionists. She talked to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews—all in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit. Uniting memoir with cultural investigation, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place, patriotism, dispossession, citizenship, and country in “an exceptionally beautiful . . . book about a search for the kind of home for which there is no straight route, the kind of home in which the journey itself is as revelatory as the destination” (Edwidge Danticat, author of The Farming of Bones).

A Tapestry of Global Christology
A Tapestry of Global Christology

Author: Isuwa Y. Atsen

Publisher: Langham Publishing

Published: 2022-12-16

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1839737948

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Who is Jesus Christ in a context of violence and bloodshed, such as that experienced by Christians in Northern Nigeria? This is the question at the heart of Dr. Isuwa Atsen’s study of global Christology. His aim, however, is not to develop a Christology that is unique to Northern Nigeria, but a Christology that is contextually and conceptually relevant to the real concerns of Nigerian Christians, while maintaining a catholic and scriptural understanding of the person of Jesus Christ. In order to do so, he weaves together three diverse christological approaches, examining the intersection of contextual theology, analytic theology, and the theological interpretation of Scripture. The approach thereby presents some helpful insights for theological methodology in general. This is an excellent resource for theologians, students, and all those involved in the task of global Christology.

Endangered Moral Values
Endangered Moral Values

Author: Sunday Bobai Agang

Publisher: Langham Publishing

Published: 2022-07-13

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 1839737077

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The erosion of moral values on a global scale has left nations vulnerable to greed, power, and violence as the shaping forces of culture. In the absence of an ethical foundation, corruption reverberates through public life, destabilizing countries and undermining human flourishing. Examining the many challenges facing Nigeria in the twenty-first century, Dr. Sunday Bobai Agang suggests that his homeland is experiencing just such a crisis – one rooted not in religion, economics, or politics but rather an eroding moral foundation. For a nation to thrive, he argues, its people must possess a moral and ethical vision characterized by sincerity and truth, love and unity. Far from representing impractical ideals, these are the virtues upon which a nation’s security and stability depend. Endangered Moral Values offers both a powerful warning of the dangers inherent in ignoring a society’s ethical and moral decay and a passionate invitation for citizens to work together towards a transformed future.

Can a Christian Be Cursed?
Can a Christian Be Cursed?

Author: Godwin O. Adeboye

Publisher: Langham Publishing

Published: 2023-04-06

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1839738278

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The belief in curses is widespread in Africa, impacting the lived reality of both Christians and non-Christians alike. In this book, Godwin Adeboye provides practical, biblical, and contextual guidelines for addressing the African conception of cursing, and for ministering to the fear and confusion such cursing elicits. He argues that African evangelical theology must begin by understanding, and valuing, the unique experiences of African Christians if it is to offer relevant answers to the real dilemmas they face. To this end, Adeboye draws on African traditional beliefs, empirical research, and the teachings of popular African pastors to provide insight into the religious and cultural contexts of the contemporary African church. Against this backdrop, he explores biblical passages on cursing and utilizes the evangelical positions on biblical authority, the atonement, personal conversion, and active mission to evaluate cultural beliefs and bring them into alignment with the gospel. While this text is an excellent resource for students of theology, missiology, and biblical or cultural studies, it is also immensely practical and deeply pastoral. Ultimately, it is a book to empower believers to confront their fear of curses equipped with the truth of Scripture.