Human dignity, decent life and human rights are effects of extensive humanitarian struggles by a people to achieve reasonable life for all. The possibility of such El Dorado was stalled in the past by unforeseen circumstances and other man-made tribulations in global history. However, these struggles will remain incomplete without a global perspective. Thus, taking the responsibility to understand humanity and her shortfalls in other parts of the globe becomes necessary. This quest consequently triggers the thorough study on how, where and why their plight is intrinsically tied to their social, cultural, religious and political background. Such genuine consequent studies can uproot the causal effect and thus guarantee the success of that developmental slogan of 'helping people to help themselves.' This study attempts to provide a platform that could chart a path towards sustainable answers to basic social questions.
This book explores how religious groups work to create sustainable relationships between people, places and environments. This interdisciplinary volume deepens our understanding of this relationship, revealing that the geographical imagination—our sense of place—is a key aspect of the sustainability ideas and practices of religious groups. The book begins with a broad examination of how place shapes faith-based ideas about sustainability, with examples drawn from indigenous Hawaiians and the sacred texts of Judaism and Islam. Empirical case studies from North America, Europe, Central Asia and Africa follow, illustrating how a local, bounded, and sacred sense of place informs religious-based efforts to protect people and natural resources from threatening economic and political forces. Other contributors demonstrate that a cosmopolitan geographical imagination, viewing place as extending from the local to the global, shapes the struggles of Christian, Jewish and interfaith groups to promote just and sustainable food systems and battle the climate crisis.
Nigeria presents an enthralling case study for understanding developing architypes in interreligious encounters in Africa. The global community needs a cultural understanding and sensitivity for productive engagement with the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world. The Nigeria religious exigencies provide a requisite intelligence into the challenges facing a global community seeking to foster peace. Without a domain of tolerance, love, equity and justice, Nigeria will continually be immured by pessimism, parochialism, cynicism and mutual suspicion. Despite being the largest economy in Africa and the most populous Black country, Nigeria demonstrates incessantly an uncommon fault-line between Christianity and Islam. The significance of this goes beyond the borders of Nigeria but has become a global showcase anywhere the two religions exist contemporaneously. Nigeria is the nexus between west and central Africa. Rooted in the dusty Sahel of the north, the savannah plains, the rich rainforests of the Atlantic coast, the rocky hills of the West, and the oil-filled swamps of the Delta. Nigeria is the beauty, sound, vision, passion and the soul of the African continent. In Nigeria, the Nigeria Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement possesses a distinctive flair that demands a holistic understanding of the movement’s historical, cultural, fundamental and religious dimensions in a multifarious religious landscape. The disquisition of the movement’s political cognizance, identity, power, authority, theology, popular culture, ethics and missiological impact in northern Nigeria presents a fine embroidery of their trials, frustrations and challenges, but inveterate in faith, hope and love that opens up innovative panoramas of peaceful dialogical prospects and coexistence between Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria. In Nigeria - Politics, Religion, Pentecostal-Charismatic Power and Challenges, Akintayo Emmanuel reconnoiters the complex missiological hindrances challenging the Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement. Their contextual missional landslide disheveled with complicated paradoxes in the way the Christian majority have responded to Muslims in northern Nigeria is anatomized. The Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement’s puissance to solve some of Nigeria political, ideological, cultural and spiritual dimensions of crisis and sectarian violence is achievable if the movement can mitigate her missiological hindrances. The responses of Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement to Nigeria’s socio-political and ethno-religious complexities can construct a great future for the soul of Nigeria. They do not only have the capacity to provide the Christian alternatives to Nigeria’s peculiarities, they can also stimulate Nigeria’s deification among other nations by continuing to disentangle from unscrupulousness and atrociousness embedded within—a reproach and opprobrium to any people.
New Perspectives on the Nigeria-Biafra War: No Victor, No Vanquished analyzes the continued impact of the Nigeria-Biafra war on the Igbo, the failure of the reconstruction and reconciliation effort in the post-war period, and the politics of exclusion of the memory of the war in public discourse in Nigeria. Furthermore, New Perspectives on the Nigeria-Biafra War explores the resilience of the Igbo people and the different strategies they have employed to preserve the history and memory of Biafra. The contributors argue that the war had important consequences for the socio-political developments in the post-war period, ushering in two differing ideologies: a paternalistic ideology of “co-option” of the Igbo by the Nigerian state, under the false premise of ‘No Victor, No Vanquished,” and the Igbo commitment to self-preservation on the other.
This book is an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between prophecy and politics in South African Pentecostalism. The role and the power of prophecy in enhancing the presence of politicians in the church square are unpacked through historical examples, as well as case studies of contemporary prophets. Solomon Kgatle argues that the influence of prophecy in politics has the potential to weaken the prophetic voice of the church in general and the Pentecostal movement in particular. He proposes a Pentecostal political theology of prophecy. This theology is developed by taking into cognizance the theoretical and theological frameworks of prophetic imagination and pneumatological imagination. In addition, this theology seeks a balance between prophecy and power and prophecy and sovereignty.
In the decades before colonial partition in Africa, the Church Missionary Society embarked on the first serious effort to evangelize in an independent Muslim state. Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther led an all-African field staff to convert the people of the Upper Niger and Confluence area, whose communities were threatened or already conquered by an expanding jihadist Nupe state. In this book, Femi J. Kolapo examines the significance of the mission as an African—rather than European—undertaking, assessing its impact on missionary practice, local engagement, and Christian conversion prospects. By offering a fuller history of this overlooked mission in the history of Christianity in Nigeria, this book reaffirms indigenous agency and rethinks the mission as an experiment ahead of its time.
This book analyses the politics of the humanitarian disarmament community—a loose coalition of activist and advocacy groups, humanitarian agencies and diplomats—who have successfully achieved international treaties banning landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons, as well as restricting the global arms trade. Two campaigns have won Nobel Peace Prizes. Disarmament has long been a dirty word in the international relations lexicon. But the success of the humanitarian disarmament agenda shows that people often choose to prohibit or limit certain violent technologies, for reasons of security, honour, ethics or humanitarianism. This edited volume showcases interdisciplinary research by scholars and practitioners seeking to understand the dynamics and impact of the new global activism on weapons. While some raise concerns that humanitarian disarmament may be piecemeal and depoliticizing, others see opportunities to breathe new life into moribund arms control policymaking. Foreword by 1997 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams.
This book focuses on the Biafran humanitarian crisis of 1967–1970 which generated a surge of human rights anxieties and attracted the attention of world humanitarian organizations. For the first time in recent history, different church groups and humanitarian activists around the world came together for the sole purpose of alleviating human suffering and saving lives regardless of theological differences, race, ethnic affiliation, nationality, and geographical distance. Despite their role in shaping the course and outcome of the conflict, most scholars of the Nigeria-Biafra War treat the humanitarian aspect of the war as a footnote, making it appear less important among other issues of interest in the conflict. Notable exceptions, however, include Joseph Thomson’s American Policy and African Famine, which focuses on American policy on the humanitarian aid, and Reverend Tony Byrne’s Airlift to Biafra. This study underlines that the international humanitarian aid largely contributed to the internationalization of the war. The efforts of the churches from thirty-three countries which remain virtually unexplored was not just the first of its kind in the developing world but also the largest civilian airlift in history. While the paucity of scholarship on the humanitarian aspect of the Biafra war could be attributed to the newness of this field of enquiry, the increase in conflicts in different parts of the world has just opened humanitarian aid studies as a new frontier in academic study. This book is a masterful example of scholarship in this newly emergent field.
For the past sixty years, the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement has played a major role in Zambia. In this book, Naar Mfundisi-Holloway explains the history of this development and its impact on civic engagement. She opens a discussion on church-state relations and explains how the church presented a channel of hope in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, despite having a history that eschewed civic engagement. In fact, the pandemic propelled the church to work alongside the state in the fight against the disease. Using interviews and historical analysis, this book provides valuable insight into how Pentecostal and Charismatic churches have effectively engaged matters of civic concern in Zambia dating from colonial times.
