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.
Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora explores the ways in which religious ideas and beliefs continue to play a crucial role in the lives of people of African descent. The chapters in this volume use historical and contemporary examples to show how people of African descent develop and engage with spiritual rituals, organizations and practices to make sense of their lives, challenge injustices and creatively express their spiritual imaginings. This book poses and answers the following critical questions: To what extent are ideas of spirituality emanating from Africa and the diaspora still influenced by an African aesthetic? What impact has globalisation had on spiritual and cultural identities of peoples on African descendant peoples? And what is the utility of the practices and social organizations that house African spiritual expression in tackling social, political cultural and economic inequities? The essays in this volume reveal how spirituality weaves and intersects with issues of gender, class, sexuality and race across Africa and the diaspora. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students interested in the study of African religions, race and religion, sociology of religion and anthropology.
Using the Akan in Ghana as a paradigmatic African representative group, African Spirituality: On Becoming Ancestors, Third Edition offers a unique African developmental praxis to eternal life immortality. Indeed, this way of life is predicated on the awareness and application of certain intrinsic values, which, if followed, lead to eternal life. As a way of living, African spirituality begins when an individual becomes morally and ethically responsible for one’s own actions while engaged on an ethical path (Ɔbra Bↄ) in pursuance of one’s unique career endeavor (Nkrabea). Though an individual quest, society is, however, the arbiter of one’s ethical and moral life, when society confers on the person adjudged a success the stage title of Nana. At old age, Ɔbra Bↄ ends as an active endeavor. However, as repositories of wisdom, senior elders continue to inculcate in succeeding generations the principles, art, and mastery of ideal life (Ɔbra pa). Then upon death, senior elders are transformed into deities, bequeathing to living descendants names worthy of evocation and worship. Indeed, this book is the first study of its kind to draw on the experiences of an entire people, their psychological dispositions and effects on the Akan during adulthood. Thus, this book brings a unique perspective to the study of spirituality, religion, developmental psychological theory, what it means to achieve perfection as an elder on earth, and upon death join the esteemed company of the Nananom Nsamanfo (Ancestors).
"An appreciative and user-friendly book on religion in the African diaspora. Murphy's skillfully drawn portraits offer an inviting introduction to the religious worlds of Vodou, Candomble, Santeria, Revival Zion, and the Black Church" – David W. Wills, Amherst College
In his widely acclaimed survey, John Mbiti sheds light on the survival and prosperity of African Religion in different historical, geographical, sociological, cultural, and physical environments. He presents a constellation of African worldviews, beliefs in God, use of symbols, valued traditions, and practices that have taken root with African peoples throughout the vast continent. Mbiti’s accessible writing style sympathetically portrays how African Religion manifests itself in ritual, festival, healing, the human life cycle, and interplay with the mystical and invisible world. The account embraces foundational traditions, while touching on elements that spawn transitions, including migration, the spread of Christianity and Islam, political-economic development, and modern communication. This popular introduction leaves readers with informed knowledge of the riches of African heritage.
With a focus on the connected spiritual legacy of the black Atlantic, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art. With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, this collection reveals and examines their shared spiritual cosmology. Diasporic in scope, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers new readings of black literatures through the prism of spiritual memory that survived the damaging impact of trans-Atlantic slaving. This memory is a significant thread that has often been missed in the reading and teaching of the literatures of the African diaspora. Essays in this collection explore unique black angles of seeing and ways of knowing that characterize African spiritual presence and influence in trans-Atlantic black artistic productions. Essays exploring works ranging from turn-of-the-century African American figure W.E.B. DuBois, South African novelist Zakes Mda, Haitian novelists Edwidge Danticat and Jacques Roumain, as well as African belief systems such as Voudoun and Candomble, provide a scope not yet offered in a single published volume. This collection explores the deep and often unconscious spiritual and psychosocial connectedness of people of African descent in the African and Ameri-Atlantic world.
"It is not for you to call profane what God counts clean." Did Christianity replace traditional African religion with the arrival of European missionaries in past centuries? Or did sub-Saharan African cultures persist in maintaining their religious worldviews even after accepting the salvific message of Christianity? In this compelling book, Laurenti Magesa argues that despite missionary Christiaity's refusal to acknowledge the worth of traditional African religious culture. the incarnational spirituality of those cultures remains vibrant and visible today, and has much to offer and teach other cultures, both Christian and not.
African Traditional religion (ATR) is one of the world religions with a great people and a great past. It is embraced by Africans within and outside the continent despite the various ethnic religious practices and beliefs. This book highlights and discusses the common elements which introduce African Traditional Religion as one unified religion and not a collection of religions. The major focus of the book is discussing the need for studying ATR in twenty-first-century Africa whereby globalization and multi-culture are prominent phenomena. Why should we study the religion of indigenous Africans in this age? In response to this question, the book argues that since ATR is part of the African people's culture, there is a need to understand this cultural background in order to contextualize Christian theology. Using some illustrations from Nyumbanitu worship shrine located at Njombe in Tanzania, the book purports that there is a need to understand African people's worldview, their understanding of God, their religious values, symbols and rituals in order to enhance meaningful dialogue between Christianity and African people's current worldview. In this case, the book is important for students of comparative religion in universities and colleges who strive to understand the various religions and their practices.
"Life is fundamentally a process of perpetual and mutual communication; and to communicate is to emit and to receive waves and radiations (minika ye minienie). This process of, receiving and releasing or passing them on (tambula ye tambikisa) is the key to human beings game of survival. A person is perpetually bathed by radiations' weight, (zitu kia minienie). The weight (zitu/demo) of radiations may have a negative as well as positive impact on any tiny being, for example a person who represents the most vibrating: "kolo" (knot) of relationships." "The following expressions are very common among the Bantu, in general, and among the Kongo in particular, which prove to us the antiquity of these concepts in the African continent; Our businesses are waved/shaken; our health is waved/shaken; what we possess is waved/shaken; the communities are waved/shaken: Where are these (negative) waves coming from (Salu bieto bieti nikunwa; mavimpi nikunwa; biltuvwidi nikunwa; makanda nikunwa: Kwe kutukanga minika miami)?" "For the Bantu, a person lives and moves within an ocean of waves/radiations. One is sensitive or immune to them. To be sensitive to waves is to be able to react negatively or positively to those waves/forces. But to be immune to surrounding waves/forces, is to be less reactive to them or not at all. These differences account for varying degrees in the process of knowing/learning among individuals" --BOOK Cover.