African traditional religion encompasses a variety of non-dogmatic, spiritual practices followed by millions around the world. Some scholars argue it is related to the Nubian religion of Egypt's Dynastic Period. In an expanded second edition, this book examines the nature of African traditional religion and describes common attributes of various cultural belief systems, with an emphasis on West Africa. Principal elements studied include sacrifice, salvation and culture, modes of revelation, divination, and African resilience in the face of invasion and colonization. The religious experiences of black people throughout the Americas are also covered. The author finds the cosmology, symbolism and rituals of the Yoruba culture to be the fundamental bases of African traditional religion, and draws similarities between the oral and written literature of West Africans and that of New World practitioners. The influence of Islam and Christianity is also discussed. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

This book analyses how religion is entangled in people’s lives in Sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia. It provides an introduction to the teachings, practices and values promoted by the main religious traditions in these regions and an overview of the evidence on what religion means to people in terms of their beliefs and religious practices and how it influences their values, attitudes and day-to-day relationships with others, especially their families. Over the course of the book Carole Rakodi explores similarities and differences between and within religious traditions and identifies some of the key factors that influence and explain the roles played by religion in people’s personal lives and social relationships. A separate companion volume will go on to focus on the social and political roles and relationships of religious groups and organisations. This book will be of great interest to academics and students working in a range of disciplines, especially sociology, religious studies and development studies but also anthropology, geography and area studies.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion interrogates and presents robust and comprehensive contributions from interdisciplinary experts and scholars. Offering a range of perspectives and opinions through the prism of understanding the past about African Traditional religions and, more importantly, capturing their dynamics in the present and projecting their sustainability and relevance for the future, this volume is an essential resource for knowledge and understanding of African Traditional religions in the global space of religious traditions.

An analysis of the ties between culture and every aspect of African life, using Africa's past to explain present situations. This book focuses on the modern cultures of Africa, from the consequences of the imposition of Western rule to the current struggles to define national identities in the context of neo-liberal economic policies and globalization.The book argues that it is against the backdrop of foreign influences that Africa has defined for itself notions of identity and development. African cultures have been evolving in response to change, and in other ways solidly rooted in a shared past. The book successfully deconstructs the last one hundred and fifty years of cultures that have been disrupted, replaced, and resurrected. The Power of African Cultures challenges many preconceived notions, such as male dominance and female submission, the supposed unity of ethnic groups, and contemporary Western stereotypes of Africans. It also shows the dynamism of African cultures to adapt to foreign imposition: even as colonial rule forced the adoption of foreign institutions and cultures, African cultures appropriated these elements. Traditions were reworked, symbols redefined, and the past situated in contemporary problems in order to accommodate the modern era. Toyin Falola is a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria. He is the recipient of the 2006 Cheikh Anta Diop Award for Exemplary Scholarship in AfricanStudies, and the 2008 Quintessence Award by the Africa Writers Endowment. He holds an honorary doctorate from Monmouth University and he is University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin where heis also the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities. His books include Nationalism and African Intellectuals and Violence in Nigeria, both from the University of Rochester Press.

Thoughtful and challenging, this book argues for a reassessment of the role historically played by Islam in Africa, and offers new hope for in creased mutual understanding between African people of different faiths. Drawing on a wealth of sources, from the colonial period to the most up-to-date scholarship, the author challenges the widely held perception th at, while Christianity oppressed and subjugated the African people, Islam fitted comfortably into the indigenous landscape. Instead, this penetrating account reveals Muslim settlers to be as guilty of enforcing slavery and conversion as those of their more maligned sister tradition. Only with an acknowledgement of the true roles of both faiths in African history, suggests Azumah, can the people of both traditions move themselves and their continent towards a new future of tolerance and self-awareness.

Theological dictionaries are foundational to any theological library. But until now there has been no Global Dictionary of Theology, a theological dictionary that presumes the contribution of the Western tradition but moves beyond it to embrace and explore a full range of global expressions of theology. The Global Dictionary of Theology is inspired by the shift of the center of Christianity from the West to the Global South. But it also reflects the increase in two-way traffic between these two sectors as well as the global awareness that has permeated popular culture to an unprecedented degree. The editorial perspective of the Global Dictionary of Theology is an ecumenical evangelicalism that is receptive to discovering new facets of truth through listening and conversation on a global scale. Thus a distinctive feature of the Global Dictionary of Theology is its conversational approach. Contributors have been called on to write in the spirit of engaging in a larger theological conversation in which alternative views are expected and invited. William A. Dyrness, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Juan F. Martinez and Simon Chan edit approximately 250 articles written by over 100 contributors representing the global spectrum of theological perspectives. Pastors, theological teachers, theological students and lay Christian leaders will all find the Global Dictionary of Theology to be a resource that unfolds new dimensions and reveals new panoramas of theological perspective and inquiry. Here is a new launching point for doing theology in today's global context.

The study of the application of the title ancestor to Christ permits the author to delve into the Christological reflection in Africa today through one of the principal ways. At play here is the inculturation of the faith, which cannot be fully achieved without a process of theological assimilation of the fundamental parameters in the African life. The thesis, therefore, is not only limited to a mere description of the contemporary panorama in that respect, but attempts to offer a theological evaluation of the real expressive capacity of the title, as it has been proposed. The criterion used is therefore double: In the first place, the thesis tried to show that the human and the divine natures of Jesus Christ can be maintained in such a way that there is no rupture with the great tradition of the Christological councils. In the second place, if it is capable of responding to demands of Christology from above and from below. In all this, however, the horizon of the debate is not occidental exegetical investigation well known by the author; but from the theological ambient of sub-Saharan world. The conclusion is positive, pondering the terms involved. The work can be of great use in the christoogical endeavors of contemporary Africa, as well for those who desire to delve into it. Don Alfonso Carrasco Rouco (director of the thesis and now Bishop of the Diocese of Lugo Spain) The work of Don Cletus Chukwuemeka contains a clear description of what we may call African traditional religiosity as well as the theological efforts to inject Christianity into this cultural and religious tradition. The central point of these efforts revolves around the understanding of Christ. The most original aspect of this work is in the critical recourse to the figure of the ancestor or proto-ancestor to present the identity of Christ in a way that is faithful to the Church tradition, and at the same time, significant for the religious and cultural tradition of Africa. Dr. Don Gerardo del Pozo Abejn (Censor of the thesis)

Presents entries A to L of a two-volume encyclopedia discussing religion around the globe, including biographies, concepts and theories, places, social issues, movements, texts, and traditions.

The coming of Colonization and Christianity to Africa and other indigenous cross-cultural contexts was a "mixed bag" of pros and cons. The impact of the advent of the two has had a lasting effect being felt even today. It created issues of bi-culturalism and bi-religiousness in personal and religious identities that counselors and the church need to address when working with people from these contexts. There is the existence of deep cultural trauma (including psychological and spiritual scars) needing healing for those living in most of these post-colonial contexts. The Western counseling approaches and Christian rituals need contextualization. A counselor or pastoral caregiver with an integrative consciousness is required to address the psychological and religious identity conflicts existing in African and other indigenous cross-cultural contexts.

Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating the relation of religion to science. Across these disciplines, magic has regularly been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that this persistence can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.