How God Became African

How God Became African
Author: Gerrie ter Haar
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2009-08-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812241738

While African Christianity has wholeheartedly appropriated the symbols, scriptures, and traditions of historic Christianity elsewhere, it has also built on the rich history of the continent's indigenous spiritual beliefs.

How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind

How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind
Author: Thomas C. Oden
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2010-07-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0830837051

Thomas C. Oden surveys the decisive role of African Christians and theologians in shaping the doctrines and practices of the church of the first five centuries, and makes an impassioned plea for the rediscovery of that heritage. Christians throughout the world will benefit from this reclaiming of an important heritage.

The Kingdom of God in Africa

The Kingdom of God in Africa
Author: Mark Shaw
Publisher: Langham Global Library
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2020-07-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 183973020X

African Christianity is not an imported religion but rather one of the oldest forms of Christianity in the world. In The Kingdom of God in Africa, Mark Shaw and Wanjiru M. Gitau trace the development and spread of African Christianity through its two-thousand year history, demonstrating how the African church has faithfully testified to the power and diversity of God’s kingdom. Both history students and casual readers will gain greater understanding of how key churches, figures and movements across the continent conceptualized the kingdom of God and manifested it through their actions. The only up-to- date, single-volume study of its kind, this book also includes maps and statistics that aid readers to absorb the rich history of African Christianity and discover its impact on the rest of the world.

Tongnaab

Tongnaab
Author: Jean Allman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2005-11-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253111838

For many Africanist historians, traditional religion is simply a starting point for measuring the historic impact of Christianity and Islam. In Tongnaab, Jean Allman and John Parker challenge the distinction between tradition and modernity by tracing the movement and mutation of the powerful Talensi god and ancestor shrine, Tongnaab, from the savanna of northern Ghana through the forests and coastal plains of the south. Using a wide range of written, oral, and iconographic sources, Allman and Parker uncover the historical dynamics of cross-cultural religious belief and practice. They reveal how Tongnaab has been intertwined with many themes and events in West African history -- the slave trade, colonial conquest and rule, capitalist agriculture and mining, labor migration, shifting ethnicities, the production of ethnographic knowledge, and the political projects that brought about the modern nation state. This rich and original book shows that indigenous religion has been at the center of dramatic social and economic changes stretching from the slave trade to the tourist trade.

Kimbanguism

Kimbanguism
Author: Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017-03-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271079681

In this volume, Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, a sociologist and son of a Kimbanguist pastor, provides a fresh and insightful perspective on African Kimbanguism and its traditions. The largest of the African-initiated churches, Kimbanguism claims seventeen million followers worldwide. Like other such churches, it originated out of black African resistance to colonization in the early twentieth century and advocates reconstructing blackness by appropriating the parameters of Christian identity. Mokoko Gampiot provides a contextual history of the religion’s origins and development, compares Kimbanguism with other African-initiated churches and with earlier movements of political and spiritual liberation, and explores the implicit and explicit racial dynamics of Christian identity that inform church leaders and lay practitioners. He explains how Kimbanguists understand their own blackness as both a curse and a mission and how that underlying belief continuously spurs them to reinterpret the Bible through their own prisms. Drawing from an unprecedented investigation into Kimbanguism’s massive body of oral traditions—recorded sermons, participant observations of church services and healing sessions, and translations of hymns—and informed throughout by Mokoko Gampiot’s intimate knowledge of the customs and language of Kimbanguism, this is an unparalleled theological and sociological analysis of a unique African Christian movement.

Was Jesus Christ a Negro? and The African Origin of the Myths & Legends of the Garden of Eden Paperback

Was Jesus Christ a Negro? and The African Origin of the Myths & Legends of the Garden of Eden Paperback
Author: John G. Jackson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 32
Release: 2015-07-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9781639231379

Jackson was born in Aiken, South Carolina, on April 1, 1907, and raised Methodist. At the age of 15 he moved to Harlem, New York, where he enrolled in Stuyvesant High School. During this time, he became interested in African-American history and culture and began writing essays on the subject. They were so impressive that in 1925, while still a high school student, Jackson was invited to write for Marcus Garvey's newspaper, "Negro World." From 1930 onwards, Jackson became associated with a number of Pan-African historians, activists and writers, including Hubert Harrison, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, John Henrik Clarke, Willis Nathaniel Huggins and Joel Augustus Rogers. He also authored a number of books on African history, promoting a Pan-African and Afrocentrist view. "Was Jesus Christ a Negro?" is one of these tracts. It is accompanied by a second related tract "The African Origin of the Myths and Legends of the Garden of Eden," also included in the second part of "Was Jesus Christ a Negro?" in which he argued that Jesus may have been a black man.

Is Africa Cursed?

Is Africa Cursed?
Author: Tokunboh Adeyemo
Publisher: WordAlive Publishers
Total Pages: 156
Release: 1997
Genre: Africa
ISBN: 9966805133

Africa's heartrending picture begs the question: Is Africa cursed? In this book, the author conveys a winning message - that there can be hope for Africa. He unwraps Africa's place in the Bible, wards off superstition and advocates Christians' active engagement in transforming Africa.

The Bible in Africa

The Bible in Africa
Author: Gerald West
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 846
Release: 2021-10-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004497102

Although the arrival of the Bible in Africa has often been a tale of terror, the Bible has become an African book. This volume explores the many ways in which Africans have made the Bible their own. The essays in this book offer a glimpse of the rich resources that constitute Africa's engagement with the Bible. Among the topics are: the historical development of biblical interpretation in Africa, the relationship between African biblical scholarship and scholarship in the West, African resources for reading the Bible, the history and role of vernacular translation in particular African contexts, the ambiguity of the Bible in Africa, the power of the Bible as text and symbol, and the intersections between class, race, gender, and culture in African biblical interpretation. The book also contains an extensive bibliography of African biblical scholarship. In fact, it is one of the most comprehensive collections of African biblical scholarship available in print. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

African Religions

African Religions
Author: Jacob K. Olupona
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199790582

This book connects traditional religions to the thriving religious activity in Africa today.