An Overview of the Concept of Religious Pluralism. Case Study of the Ghanaian Milieu

An Overview of the Concept of Religious Pluralism. Case Study of the Ghanaian Milieu
Author: Adam Konadu
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 43
Release: 2018-01-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3668625913

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Sociology - Religion, grade: -, , language: English, abstract: This paper provides an overview of the concept of Religious Pluralism. By so doing, it attempts to present the definition of the concept religious pluralism, its basis, characteristics, causes, ways of ensuring it, effects, challenges and the future of religious pluralism in Ghana.

Religious Pluralism and It's Effects on Ghanaian Society

Religious Pluralism and It's Effects on Ghanaian Society
Author: Adam Konadu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2018-12-18
Genre:
ISBN: 9783668876736

Essay from the year 2018 in the subject Theology - Miscellaneous, language: English, abstract: This work is on the effects of religious pluralism on the Ghanaian society. It seeks to discuss how religious pluralism has affected the people of Ghana. It is realized that the lifestyle of the people of Ghana is characterized by the recognition for the religious other. Recognition for and tolerance of other religions is found to be evident in almost all the aspects of the life of the people. The impact of the system of religious tolerance and cooperation on the people has been positive and negative. Thus, religious pluralism has been a mixed blessing to Ghanaians.

Sociological Abstracts

Sociological Abstracts
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2003
Genre: Sociology
ISBN:

CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.

RELIGIOUS SYNCRETISM IN AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY

RELIGIOUS SYNCRETISM IN AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY
Author: ISAIAH OLUWAJEMIRIYE OLATOYAN
Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2024-04-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

Christianity among the African people, whether on the soil of Africa or in diaspora, is perceived and defined differently by different people. For instance, among African traditional religious people and Muslims, Christianity is a foreign religion that must not be allowed to thrive in Africa. To several Africans who profess Jesus, Christianity is good, but it is not adequate and effective enough to handle all human needs. Still, among some Western Christians and missionaries, African Christianity is superficial and lacks total commitment to Christ. Of course, the Africans are a cultural people with profound religious inclinations. Their traditional religion (ATR) has tremendously shaped their worldviews and socioeconomic and political activities. Consequently, when traditional Africans are converted to Christianity, they do not break ties with their traditional religions completely. The examination of relevant biblical texts on syncretism, however, reveals that God condemns the worship of many gods and places a curse on anyone who offers sacrifices to carved images and bows to them in worship. Therefore, this work investigates the root cause of religious syncretism among African people. In the attempt to find answers to why the average African Christian finds it difficult, if not impossible, to abandon his/her traditional religious belief systems completely to embrace Christianity, the author concludes that unless the issues surrounding the African forgotten and secret covenants are exposed and decisively addressed in the light of biblical teaching, syncretism will continue to be a stigma on the fabric of African Christianity. Therefore, to overcome the threats of syncretism in African Christianity, there is a need to establish a sound theological and missiological framework that can address the problems associated with the African worldviews and belief systems. This task must be carried out under the searchlight of Scriptures.

Hindu Gods in West Africa

Hindu Gods in West Africa
Author: Albert Wuaku
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2013-07-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004255710

In Hindu Gods in West Africa, Wuaku offers an account of the histories, beliefs and practices of the Hindu Monastery of Africa and the Radha Govinda Temple, two Hindu Temples in Ghana. Using historical material and data from his field work in southern Ghana, Wuaku shows how these two Hindu Temples build their traditions on popular Ghanaian religious notions about the powerful magicality of India's Hindu gods. He explores how Ghanaian soldiers who served in the colonial armies in India, Sri Lanka, and Burma during World War II, Bollywood films, and local magicians, have contributed to the production and the spreading of these cultural ideas. He argues that while Ghanaian worshippers appropriated and deployed the alien Hindu religious world through their own cultural ideas, as they engage Hindu beliefs and rituals in negotiating challenges their own worldviews would change considerably.

Culture and Customs of Ghana

Culture and Customs of Ghana
Author: Steven J. Salm
Publisher: Greenwood
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2002-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Provides an overview of the history and culture of Ghana, featuring discussion of the country's religion and thought, the arts, cuisine and traditional dress, gender roles, marriage and family, social customs, and lifestyle.

Lived Religion

Lived Religion
Author: Meredith B McGuire
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2008-08-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190451319

How can we grasp the complex religious lives of individuals such as Peter, an ordained Protestant minister who has little attachment to any church but centers his highly committed religious practice on peace-and-justice activism? Or Hannah, a devout Jew whose rich spiritual life revolves around her women's spirituality group and the daily practice of meditative dance? Or Laura, who identifies as Catholic but rarely attends Mass, and engages daily in Buddhist-style meditation at her home altar arranged with symbols of Mexican American popular religion? Diverse religious practices such as these have long baffled scholars, whose research often starts with the assumption that individuals commit, or refuse to commit, to an entire institutionally framed package of beliefs and practices. Meredith McGuire points the way forward toward a new way of understanding religion. She argues that scholars must study religion not as it is defined by religious organizations, but as it is actually lived in people's everyday lives. Drawing on her own extensive fieldwork, as well as recent work by others, McGuire explores the many, seemingly mundane, ways that individuals practice their religions and develop their spiritual lives. By examining the many eclectic and creative practices -- of body, mind, emotion, and spirit -- that have been invisible to researchers, she offers a fuller and more nuanced understanding of contemporary religion.

The Anthropology of Christianity

The Anthropology of Christianity
Author: Fenella Cannell
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2006-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822388154

This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse

Pentecostal Exorcism

Pentecostal Exorcism
Author: Opoku Onyinah
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2019-05-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004397108

"Witchcraft" and exorcism have long been dominant features of life in African cultures. This unique book provides a thorough, field research-based description and analysis of a specifically Pentecostal Christian response to these phenomena within the Akan culture of Ghana. Anthropological studies generally claim that the ultimate goal of exorcism is modernisation. Using interdisciplinary studies with a theological focus, the author takes a different view, arguing that it is divinatory consultation or an inquiry into the sacred and the search for meaning that underlies the current "deliverance" ministry, where the focus is to identify and break down the so-called demonic forces by the power of God and to "deliver" people from their torment. The deliverance ministry is one attempt to contextualise the gospel for African people. However, preoccupation with demonisation and exorcistic practices is found to bring Christianity into tension with the Akan culture, family ties and other religions. In order to develop a properly safeguarded ministry of exorcism in an African context, the author examines contextualisation and suggests the integration into African Christianity of divinatory consultation, which has strong resonances with the biblical concept of prayer.

Managing the Environmental Crisis in Ghana

Managing the Environmental Crisis in Ghana
Author: Kwasi Nyamekye
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2014-11-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 144387132X

Due to the strong inroads that Western scientism and Western Christianity have made in Africa as a result of colonialism, post-colonial African governments have tended to rely solely on Western scientific conservation epistemologies and models to the neglect of those of the Indigenous African peoples in addressing their environmental problems. However, there is enough evidence that neither modern (scientific) nor indigenous epistemologies and modes of addressing current ecological problems ar...