God, Spirit, and Human Wholeness
God, Spirit, and Human Wholeness

Author: Elochukwu Eugene Uzukwu

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2012-03-09

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1610971906

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The Holy Spirit provides access to relationship with and reflection on the Triune God. In West Africa, Christians approach the Triune God in a way that challenges the Jewish-Christian memory. Deeply rooted in their ancestral memory, where living is relationality, they embrace the Trinitarian faith, the economy of the relational God-Christ-Spirit, by expanding and reinventing their indigenous experience of God, deities, spirits, and ancestors. Christian faith-practice is marked by the spectacular dominance of the Holy Spirit, whose charisms reflect the operations of deities. African Initiated Churches (AICs), Protestant and Catholic charismatic movements, experience God-Spirit's liberating and healing hand for the enhancement and realization of communal and individual destiny (what one expects from a concerned providential deity). This book argues that the emergent West African Trinitarian imagination is in harmony with Hebrew insight into the One and Only Yahweh of the patriarchs that assumed the dimensions of Elohim, God--experienced as a sound of sheer silence by Elijah, and proposed in utter weakness as the Only God by Deutero-Isaiah--the God that Jesus called Abba, Father. As Spirit and Life, the Holy Spirit, which is the source of all charisms (Origen), is our link to the Trinity.

Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart

Author: Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1994-09-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0385474547

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“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

Overcoming the Osu Caste System among the Afro-Igbo
Overcoming the Osu Caste System among the Afro-Igbo

Author: John Ugochukwu Opara

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 3643911122

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It is the conviction of Sacramentum Caritatis as well as the fathers of the Second Vatican Council that active participation at Eucharistic celebration cannot be easily disassociated from active involvement in the Church's mission in the world. This present study in the light of the foregoing presuppositions, exposes some of such challenges confronting the Afro-Igbo Christian, with special focus on the menace of the osu caste system, and proposes ways towards its eradication. One of such ways remains strengthening the Eucharistic celebration through the process of the inculturation.

A Spirit of Dialogue
A Spirit of Dialogue

Author: Christopher N. Okonkwo

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1572336153

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A groundbreaking study, A Spirit of Dialogue examines through extensive, interdisciplinary research, theory, and close reading the intricate reconstructions, extensions, and resonances of the West African myth of spirit children, the "Born-to-Die," in contemporary African American neo-slave narratives. Arguing that the myth, called "Ogbañje" in Igbo language and "àbíkú" in Yoruba, has had over thirty years of uncharted presence in African American literature, Okonkwo advances a compelling case absent in extant scholarship. He traces Ogbañje/the Born-to-Die's appearance in African American texts to a convergence of factors. They include but are not limited to: the impact of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart; the 1960s emergence of the contemporary neo-slave narrative; the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness/Black Power movement and the cultural agenda, gendered politics, and centripetal philosophy of the Black Arts movement's nationalist aesthetic; African American identity questions of the post-civil rights and the multicultural eras; and the thematic shifts, as well as the African diaspora orientation of African American fiction of the post-nationalist aesthetic period. A Spirit of Dialogue focuses on the sometimes neglected and understudied works of four canonical African American writers: Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Tananarive Due's The Between, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, and Toni Morrison's Sula and Beloved. Okonkwo demonstrates persuasively how the mythic spirit child informs the content and form of these novels, offering Butler, Due, Wideman, and Morrison a non-occidental "code" by which to engage collectively with the various issues integral to the history experience of African-descended people. The paradigm functions, then, as the nexus of a life-affirmative dialogue among the six novels, as well as between them and other works of African religious and literary imagination, particularly Things Fall Apart and Ben Okri's The Famished Road.

Ori-Oke Spirituality and Social Change in Africa
Ori-Oke Spirituality and Social Change in Africa

Author: Nathanael Yaovi

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2018-09-17

Total Pages: 588

ISBN-13: 9956550280

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The dynamic nature of Christianity has necessitated its movement from the cathedral to the mountain top. This has occasioned a proliferation of Prayer Mountains throughout Africa. In Yorubaland of southwestern Nigeria, Prayer Mountain is known as Ori-Oke. Like many communities in Africa, the Yoruba are confronted with fundamental challenges in life for which people do not rest until they find solutions. Within the praxis of Nigerian Christian lexicon Ori-Oke is synonymous with the enactment of a sacred space on a mountain top characterised by various prayer regimes, rituals, exorcism and religious practices, aimed at eliciting the help of the divine to alleviate the existential challenges of devotees. This book explores the resacralisation of space on the mountains, highlighting how humans and the divine interact in Yorubaland. It brings into conversation 35 empirically rich scholarly essays on the role of Ori-Oke to those seeking divine intervention in their lives. Today, Ori-Oke have become centres of pilgrimage as a result of the lived experiences of devotees, creating unique religious value quite distinct from the aesthetic value of these mountain tops. The spirituality of Ori-Oke is anchored on the absolute belief in God and the infusion of traditional African worldview sensibilities in religious rites and worship. Ori-Oke spirituality employs resources of Christian tradition, introduced by the formal agents of Christianity, synthesised with traditional culture, to develop a life based on the precepts of an African Christianity. The book is an intellectual discourse on Ori-Oke spirituality, reflecting its contemporary relevance in a context of religious innovation and competition.

Ofo
Ofo

Author: Christopher I. Ejizu

Publisher: Fourth Dimension Publishing Company

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13:

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A study of Igbo ritual symbolism is of primary significance to the systematic reconstruction of Igbo traditional religious experience and life. As the clearest visible expression of the corpus of Igbo beliefs, sacred symbols provide reliable information about indigenous religious thought and socio-cultural life. This is especially the case with the dominant symbol of Ofo, since it occupies a unique place in the Igbo ritual network. The book makes a systematic and detailed analysis of Ofo ritual symbol, including its provenance, structural variations and functional range in the different sub-cultural zones of Igboland, and its dense meaning- content. The study is presented from a historical perspective.