Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage

Description

The rapid development of African Christianity and its offshoots in the Diaspora is rooted in colonial history and resistance to oppression, exploitation and slavery. Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora offers new resources for the interpretation and analysis of African Christian movements. It draws attention to a number of key issues, including the translatability of the Christian faith, the process of contextualization in various cultures, the place and role of indigenous agencies, the global impact of contemporary African Christian expressions, its influence on ecumenical relations and inter-religious encounters, and its way of shaping new religious identities and landscapes in response to power relations and artificial boundaries. Topics covered include the concept of diaspora, deconstructing colonial mission, conversion, African cosmologies, African retentions, female leadership dynamics, liberation theology, a new discourse around HIV/AIDS, transnational religious networks, pentecostal/charismatic movements, charismatic renewal within former mission churches, dynamics of reverse mission, outreach via cyberspace, specific studies on Anglican, Baptist, Adventist and Kimbanguist missions, and the need for intercultural and interdenominational bridge building.

Afe Adogame is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Religion and Society, and Chair of History and Ecumenics Department, Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, USA. He is also Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa and author of The African Christian Diaspora (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Roswith Gerloff is Founding Director of the Centre for Black and White Christian Partnership, Birmingham, UK, and former Senior Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. Klaus Hock is Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Rostock, Germany.

Jeanes brings new insights on Cranmer through his careful and arduous analyses of liturgical and sacramental subtleties, and this delivers a real contribution to our understanding of Cranmer, both the liturgist and the theologian. * Religious Studies Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, December 2009 * La diversite des contributions reunies dans ce livre, permet aux lectures de se faire une idee rapide des manieres bien differentes dont historiens, sociologues, theologiens et pratiquants analysent les developpements des christianismes africains (essentiellement Anglophones) et de la diaspora africaine. * Archives de sciences sociales des religions, December 2009 * This highly informative and illuminating volume will be an indispensable resource for students of contemporary African Christianity. It is worth noting that all the chapters contribute to a much better understanding of the present realities with regard to Africa's place as a major theater of action of world Christianity today. * Cephas Omenyo, Pneuma, Vol. 31, 2009 * This volume...shows courage and passion on the part of the contributors in addressing one of the most turbulent issues in modern history. * Bibliographia Missionaria * Its strength is the variety of topics covered, the differences in perspectives, even disciplines, and the number of authors, many from Africa who have not yet published widely. * Journal of Contemporary Religion * The rapid growth of African Christianity is attracting much scholarly attention because of the nature and peculiarities of the emergent Christianity and because its expansion into the global north is reshaping the religious landscape. This book achieves much by interpreting contemporary African Christianity from four perspectives: historically, it looks back to the development of African Christianity from the nineteenth century missionary era to the recent Africanization of Anglicanism. It is attentive to gender, to the explosion of charismatic Pentecostalism without ignoring the African Instituted Churches, and to the various aspects of immigrant Christianities in Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It weaves African church history into African American and Caribbean fabrics. This is a genuine attempt to underscore the vitality and global significance of a southern Christianity after Christendom and includes the voices of over a dozen African scholars. An important and rich resource for teaching and evaluating contemporary African Christianity. -- Ogbu U. Kalu, Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity, McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, USA An Aladdin's cave of a book, richly stocked with materials, some provocative, some informative, many illuminating. Since Africa is now one of the principal theatres of action of the Christian faith, the insights provided into the living and thinking of contemporary African Christians, both in Africa and beyond, are particularly valuable. -- Professor Andrew F Walls, University of Edinburgh and Liverpool Hope University, UK The brief overviews and specific focuses represent many years of rich interdisciplinary scholarship on Christianity in Africa and the diaspora, and reading the author's analysis is a rewarding experience. * Religious Studies Review, Vol. 35, No.4, December 2009 *