Encyclopedia of African Religion
Encyclopedia of African Religion

Author: Molefi Kete Asante

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2008-11-26

Total Pages: 1582

ISBN-13: 1506317863

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Numerous titles focusing on particular beliefs in Africa exist, including Marcel Griaule′s Conversations with Ogotemmeli, but this one presents an unparallelled exploration of a multitude of cultures and experiences. It is both a gateway to deeper exploration and a penetrating resource on its own. This is bound to become the definitive scholarly resource on African religions." — Library Journal, Starred Review "Overall, because of its singular focus, reliability, and scope, this encyclopedia will prove invaluable where there is considerable interest in Africa or in different religious traditions." –Library Journal As the first comprehensive work to assemble ideas, concepts, discourses, and extensive essays in this vital area, the Encyclopedia of African Religion explores such topics as deities and divinities, the nature of humanity, the end of life, the conquest of fear, and the quest for attainment of harmony with nature and other humans. Editors Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama include nearly 500 entries that seek to rediscover the original beauty and majesty of African religion. Features · Offers the best representation to date of the African response to the sacred · Helps readers grasp the enormity of Africa′s contribution to religious ideas by presenting richly textured concepts of spirituality, ritual, and initiation while simultaneously advancing new theological categories, cosmological narratives, and ways to conceptualize ethical behavior · Provides readers with new metaphors, figures of speech, modes of reasoning, etymologies, analogies, and cosmogonies · Reveals the complexity, texture, and rhythms of the African religious tradition to provide scholars with a baseline for future works The Encyclopedia of African Religion is intended for undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as Religion, Africana Studies, Sociology, and Philosophy.

Law and Religion, An Overview
Law and Religion, An Overview

Author: Silvio Ferrari

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 1351560778

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The focus of this volume is on the historical and geographical elements of law and religion. The first part delineates and analyzes the relation between church and state from the Gregorian Revolution to the human rights era and gives a sense of the evolution of the church and state relationship, whilst the second part explores law and religion issues around the world. The volume redresses the tendency towards a western-centric approach in the discipline by including essays from regional experts which present local approaches to law and religion in Asia, Africa, and South America. The collection is unique in that it brings together wide-ranging case studies and out-of-print papers and is an important resource for established and new scholars in the field.

African Biblical Studies
African Biblical Studies

Author: Andrew M. Mbuvi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-09-22

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0567707741

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Andrew M. Mbuvi makes the case for African biblical studies as a vibrant and important emerging distinct discipline, while also using its postcolonial optic to critique biblical studies for its continued underlying racially and imperialistically motivated tendencies. Mbuvi argues that the emergence of biblical studies as a discipline in the West coincides with, and benefits from, the establishment of the colonial project that included African colonization. At the heart of the colonial project was the Bible, not only as ferried by missionaries, who often espoused racialized views, to convert “heathens in the distant lands,” but as the text used in the racialized justification of the colonial violence. Interpretive approaches established within these racist and colonialist matrices continue to dominate the discipline, perpetuating racialized interpretive methodology and frameworks. On these grounds, Mbuvi makes the case that the continued marginalization of non-western approaches is a reflection of the continuing colonialist structure and presuppositions in the discipline of biblical studies. African Biblical Studies not only exposes and critiques these persistent oppressive and subjugating tendencies but showcases how African postcolonial methodologies and studies, that prioritize readings from the perspective of the marginalized and oppressed, offer an alternative framework for the discipline. These readings, while destabilizing and undermining the predominantly white Euro-American approaches and their ingrained prejudices, and problematizing the biblical text itself, posit the need for biblical interpretation that is anti-colonial and anti-racist.

Empire of Religion
Empire of Religion

Author: David Chidester

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-03-19

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 022611757X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in Empire of Religion, documenting and analyzing the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in southern Africa. In the process, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project. In developing a material history of the study of religion, Chidester documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religions was produced. He then identifies the recurrence of these mediations in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max Müller’s dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan’s fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s studies of African religion. By reclaiming these theorists for this history, Chidester shows that race, rather than theology, was formative in the emerging study of religion in Europe and North America. Sure to be controversial, Empire of Religion is a major contribution to the field of comparative religious studies.

Queering Black Atlantic Religions
Queering Black Atlantic Religions

Author: Roberto Strongman

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2019-03-14

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1478003456

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Queering Black Atlantic Religions Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body, the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production, Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black, trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche, soul, and gender as multiple, removable, and external to the body.

Law and Religion in the 21st Century
Law and Religion in the 21st Century

Author: Rinaldo Cristofori

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1317107837

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book brings together leading international scholars of law and religion to provide an overview of current issues in State-religion relations. The first part of the collection offers a picture of recent developments in key countries and regions. The second part is focused on Europe and, in particular, on the Nordic States and the post-communist countries where State-religion systems have undergone most profound change. The third and final part is devoted to four issues that are currently debated all over the world: the relations between freedom of expression and freedom of religion; proselytism and the right to change religion; the religious symbols; and the legal status of Islam in Europe and Canada. The work will be a valuable resource for academics, students and policy-makers with an interest in the interaction between law and religion.

The African Poor
The African Poor

Author: John Iliffe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1987-12-25

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780521348775

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This history of the poor of Sub-Saharan Africa begins in the monasteries of thirteenth-century Ethiopia and ends in the South African resettlement sites of the 1980s. Its thesis, derived from histories of poverty in Europe, is that most very poor Africans have been individuals incapacitated for labour, bereft of support, and unable to fend for themselves in a land-rich economy. There has emerged the distinct poverty of those excluded from access to productive resources. Natural disaster brought widespread destitution, but as a cause of mass mortality it was almost eliminated in the colonial era, to return to those areas where drought has been compounded by administrative breakdown. Professor Iliffe investigates what it was like to be poor, how the poor sought to help themselves, how their counterparts in other continents live. The poor live as people, rather than merely parading as statistics. Famines have alerted the world to African poverty, but the problem itself is ancient. Its prevailing forms will not be understood until those of earlier periods are revealed and trends of change are identified. This is a book for all concerned with the future of Africa, as well as for students of poverty elsewhere.

Theology and Identity
Theology and Identity

Author: Kwame Bediako

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2011-06-01

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 1610974409

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Kwame Bediako examines the question of Christian identity in the context of the Greco-Roman culture of the early Roman Empire. He then addresses the modern African predicament of quests for identity and integration. Theology and Identity was one of the finalists for the 1992 HarperCollins Religious Book Award.