Faith in African Lived Christianity最新文献

{"title":"Liberationist Conversion and Ethnography in the Decolonial Moment: a Finnish Theologian/Ethicist Reflects in South Africa","authors":"Elina Hankela","doi":"10.1163/9789004412255_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412255_005","url":null,"abstract":"As ethnography has become more popular among theologians, scholars have begun a discussion on what it means to do ethnography specifically as a theologian.1 Even though empirical theology has been an important aspect of practical theology since the 1990s, some argue that empirical research in theology continues to be methodologically dependent on the social sciences, and urge theologians to think of qualitative research, including theological ethnography, as more than collecting data using social science methods and reflecting on it theologically.2 This chapter joins this collective effort to think about ethnography as a method in theology. The “ethnography and (Christian)3 theology” conversation to date is largely centered in North America and Europe, as the references to some of the leading scholars on the topic above and the contributors in some of the recent edited volumes indicate.4 This conversation also resonates with anthropologists’ growing interest in, and engagement with, the relationship between","PeriodicalId":131591,"journal":{"name":"Faith in African Lived Christianity","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126766976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"African Migrant Christianities – Delocalization or Relocalization of Identities?","authors":"S. Eriksen, T. Drønen, Ingrid Løland","doi":"10.1163/9789004412255_012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412255_012","url":null,"abstract":"African migrant Christianity is a field that has been attracting increased academic interest in recent decades. Numerous studies within anthropology and theology have discussed the topic in general and activities connected with it in different countries in particular. In addition, the theme has been studied as a transnational field where the relationship between the soil of the ancestors and the new homeland has been brought to the fore. This chapter highlights two particular aspects of epistemological and ontological interest in order to address the question of how anthropology and theology can come into dialogue: firstly, through analysis of how technology influences human behavior, permits simultaneity, and affects Christian discursive practices in transnational and transcultural relations; secondly, by looking at how migration and the new media affect identity construction for the individual believer. The chapter will start by highlighting some of the globalizing processes that have influenced the development of various African Christianities and, in particular, the activities of the Nigerian-based Redeemed Christian Church of God (rccg) in Norway. Of special interest is how technological media and new forms of communication – in particular through the Internet and social media – generate simultaneity in religious practices and facilitate the development of congregations across long distances. The second section of the chapter deals with the relationship between migration, identity construction, and religion, focusing in particular on theories of identity construction linked to religious practices in diaspora churches. Towards the end of the chapter recent developments among African transnational churches are discussed within the framework of technology and forms of identity-making. How do technological innovations influence the individual, and how do questions of technology and migration affect theology, understood as religious discursive practices? Does the intensified use of the Internet and social media favor theories of delocalized identities, or could it be","PeriodicalId":131591,"journal":{"name":"Faith in African Lived Christianity","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128074051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revealed Medicine as an Expression of an African Christian Lived Spirituality","authors":"C. Sundberg","doi":"10.1163/9789004412255_017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412255_017","url":null,"abstract":"Tropical Africa is often mediated through televised news programs and the printed press as a region where plagues, famine, and wars dominate the suffering populations. Very seldom we see reports on other parts of the social realities in which people live. During my years in both Congos, I have met people from various Christian denominations and visited fast growing Christian congregations that engage in a diversity of activities for the benefit of the societies in which they operate. Some denominations run schools and hospitals in areas where governmental health-care and schooling does not suffice. Many parishes have health centers and nutrition projects for those that have lost everything except their lives. Quite a few of these centers have been established on the basis of revelations and dreams. As will be shown below, the Kongo people traditionally live in two worlds: the “day world” and the “night world.”1 What is experienced in the night world may well be realized in the day world. Dreaming of a health clinic may result in the construction of one. In this chapter, based on fieldwork carried out in Brazzaville, in the Republic of Congo, I present the results of my studies of a method of healing that was revealed during and after the spiritual Revival of 1947 (described below), in today’s Evangelical Church of Congo: a method referred to as the Revealed Medicine. Between 1982 and 2010, I periodically lived and worked in Brazzaville as a missionary pastor and teacher in the Eglise Evangélique du Congo (eec). Like many other Westerners I have suffered from malaria, parasites, wounds, and other illnesses, and I have met with several people suffering from diseases that I have never even heard of. Naturally I have been interested in finding out what people do to get well. There are a few state-owned hospitals in Brazzaville and","PeriodicalId":131591,"journal":{"name":"Faith in African Lived Christianity","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127235343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Objects to Subjects of Religious Studies in Africa: Methodological Agnosticism and Methodological Conversion","authors":"F. Wijsen","doi":"10.1163/9789004412255_004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412255_004","url":null,"abstract":"In reaction to late nineteenth-century (social) scientific studies of religion as an epiphenomenon of something else, whether structures of society or those of the mind, early twentieth-century phenomenological approaches attempted to study religion as a thing in itself. Due to secularization, among other factors, scholars of religion abandoned the phenomenological approach and its notion of religion as sui generis in the early 1970s,1 and advocated methodological agnosticism, at least in the West. Since then there has been a mostly hidden but sometimes manifest tension between “Western” and “non-Western” approaches, or dominant and peripheral voices in the study of religion, which call for a postcolonial approach.2 In this chapter I analyze a debate on these issues between members of the African Association for the Study of Religions (aasr) which was established at the first Regional Conference in Africa of the International Association for the History of Religions (iahr), held at Harare in 1992.3 Based on the proceedings of this conference, one of the founding fathers of the aasr, Jan Platvoet,4 wrote a chapter entitled From Object to Subject for a volume he co-edited. In this chapter he described and analyzed the shift in the study of religion in Africa from the era in which Africa was the “object” of European historians, anthropologists, and theologians, to the era in which Africa became the “subject” of the study of religion in Africa. Platvoet5 con-","PeriodicalId":131591,"journal":{"name":"Faith in African Lived Christianity","volume":"261 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133211674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Re-thinking the Study of Religion: Lessons from Field Studies of Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora","authors":"Galia Sabar","doi":"10.1163/9789004412255_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412255_006","url":null,"abstract":"Three stories, recorded from my field notes, comprise this chapter. These encounters provide insights into how I formulated my work with, and study of religion among, different societies from the African continent. The first occurred in the early 1980s in Ethiopia, when I was studying Ethiopian Jews at the beginning of my academic training. The second took place in the late 1980s, when I was about to begin my PhD fieldwork in Kenya, and the third in Israel with African Christian labor migrants, nearly 20 years later. For 30 years, I have studied Judaism, Christianity, and local religions, mainly through an anthropological and qualitative lens, in Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda, Cameroon, and Eritrea. The three encounters served as milestones during these years, forcing me to critically reflect on my understanding of the belief systems I was studying, more specifically to re-think the relations between anthropology and religion, theory and praxis, researchers’ identities and informants’ identities, research missions and daily practicalities. In this chapter, I discuss some major challenges I have faced over the years. Two main issues have kept appearing: (1) Can researchers such as myself, who belong, or are seen as belonging, to specific groups/identities study others who are, or who are seen as, different? And (2) How close is my understanding of the religions I studied, of their manifestations and meaning to the people who believe in these religions, and to those of other researchers? My starting point was that there are more commonalities than differences when conducting fieldwork anywhere in the world, and that the “right” combination of knowledge, research tools, curiosity, empathy, sensitivity, humility, and reflexivity would enable me to conduct scientifically-grounded research, even when the gaps appeared enormous between me and the people I was researching. While writing this chapter, I kept hearing Talal Asad’s1 critique of anthropological work, in general, and anthropology that deals with other people’s","PeriodicalId":131591,"journal":{"name":"Faith in African Lived Christianity","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117008536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"World Christianity and the Reorganization of Disciplines: On the Emerging Dialogue between Anthropology and Theology","authors":"J. Robbins","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198797852.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198797852.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter reviews recent changes in anthropology and theology to suggest that these changes bring them to a point where their paths are ready to cross. The change considered in anthropology is the unexpectedly rapid rise of what is called the anthropology of Christianity. More specifically, the chapter examines the prosperity gospel, in which believers are convinced that God wants health and wealth for them in this world and overwhelmingly stress these themes in their worship. Scholars in the Western academy tend to find this kind of Christianity hard to assimilate to their more general understandings of the faith, or at least to their favorite understandings. But a closer look at how this kind of Christianity trips up both theologians and anthropologists reveals places where both disciplines would be open to help from each other, the provision of which might lay the basis for a new kind of transformative dialogue.","PeriodicalId":131591,"journal":{"name":"Faith in African Lived Christianity","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131110803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}