This book explores the strategies and methods of the Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries in Igboland and Igbo response during the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Using oral traditions, primary sources, and the author's life experience as a Christian convert and missionary, the text examines the missions' programs, missteps, and impact.

The joy over the growth of Christianity in Africa is also a challenge to all concerned to help Christianity take roots, ennoble and become one with the cultural life of the numerous tribes of Africa. This missionary expectation is not yet fully realized in many local churches in Africa. From these perspectives, Adolphus Chikezie Anuka inaugurates a new brand of concrete, target-oriented emphasis on dialogical inculturation. In this book, the Mmanwu cultural institution of the Igbo people of south eastern Nigeria stands in central focus, opening itself to the influences of Christian values as well as speaking to the religious assumptions of Christianity. The theoretical results of this research work and its practical pastoral suggestions are both enlightening and appealing.

The need for renegotiation of the place and role of women in the family, the Church, and the society cannot be any more urgent than now, especially as people are more aware of the devastating effects of the evils of inequality, discrimination, and oppression. It is a pity that the excellent qualities of bravery, industry, resilience, and perseverance historically attributed to African women, with which they negotiated for better place in the family, the Church, and the society, have been manipulated to serve as instruments for their denigration. The problem is that the patriarchal articulations of gender relations from the western world that entered Africa through colonialism, Christianity, western education and globalization allied themselves with the macho elements in African culture, and institutionalized the oppression of women; a move that women have always resisted both overtly and covertly. But how long could they hang on? This book provides exceptional and critical assessment of these issues, especially from the perspective of the Igbo society of Nigeria. Apart from assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the efforts made by women themselves to surmount these challenges, it also explores how the autochthonous values of the traditional culture could integrate with Christian values to enthrone gender equality in the society. Fr Muonwe demonstrated in this present publication his pastoral zeal for justice especially on the predicaments of women in African nay Igbo society. He regrets as it were that the African (Igbo) traditional society is still far from realizing the Christian gospel ideal of dignity and equality of human person because of the obvious environment that is strictly androcentric and carefully crafted in patriarchal hegemony I thank Fr Muonwe for this timely publication especially for many Igbo Christian communities today experiencing crisis in several aspects of our culture I hope the Bishops, the Priests, the Religious and Laity will find in this present work a rare and indispensable treasure for solutions to our pastoral predicaments. Rev. Fr. Prof. Anthony B. C. Chiegboka. New Dawn for African Women is encyclopaedic in content and daunting in its wealth of documentation [It] is a well-written book. The contents covered much more than Igbo women, or gender issues. It addressed such other issues as Igbo cosmology, Igbo concept of life and death, the history of Christianity in Igboland and Igbo social anthropology, among others. It is a book, which every Nigerian, especially the Igbo, should read. The book is inspirational and provocative in the extreme; it is original and displays learning lightly carried. One cannot but return to it over and over again after the first reading. I very strongly recommend it to the Nigerian and African reading public. C. Ego Uzoezie (Ph.D.)

Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming). However, when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest. No single, unitary paradigm defines conversion and no easily explicable process accounts for why people convert to Christianity. Rather, a multiplicity of factors-historical, personal, social, geographical, theological, psychological, and cultural-shape the converting process. A History of Christian Conversion not only narrates the conversions of select individuals and peoples, it also engages current theories and models to explain conversion, and examines recurring themes in the conversion process: divine presence, gender and the body, agency and motivation, testimony and memory, group- and self-identity, "authentic" and "nominal" conversion, and modes of communication. Accessible to scholars, students, and those with a general interest in conversion, Kling's book is the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history to date; this major work will become a standard must-read in conversion studies.

WHAT IMPACT HAS CHURCH MISSIONARY EDUCATION (CME) HAD IN AFRICA, ESPECIALLY SINCE THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES? Reclaiming Traditions of Igbo Education and the Legacy of the Holy Ghost Missionaries finds answers to that question. This book critically assesses the benefits and burdens of the Church Missionary Education (CME) of the Holy Ghost Missionaries among nd’Igbo in southeastern Nigeria. It interrogates the propriety of its philosophy and reviews the adequacy of the methods used to promote it. While critics lament the damage done by European explorers, merchants, colonialists, and missionaries to the educational traditions of Africa, apologists who defend them suggest that they did their best under prevailing circumstances. They ask, “Instead of revisit the past, why not get on with the business of modern times?” But the impact of the European presence in Africa is not a thing of the past. It is part of “Africa’s current and existential socioeconomic, political, religious, and educational struggles today. 1 This book describes the limitations of the neo-colonizing educational philosophy of the missionaries and calls for an alternative. A philosophy of wholeness is proposed as an alternative that would transition Africans to a liberating and liberatory Christian Religious Education (CRE) of the gospels. Such, it is argued, would better serve their needs and aspirations, and better heal the wounds of their colonial past. About the Author OKONKWO REMIGIUS NWABICHIE is a priest of Orlu diocese. He holds degrees in Philosophy, Theology, Administration, and Religious Education. He is the author of Religion for Morality in Education, Self-Reliant African Churches, and a forthcoming volume, Methods for Promoting Christian Religious Education in Africa. A lively discussant in Igbo/African affairs, and curriculum development, he can be reached at: ronaac2004@yahoo.com or remichie62@aol.com.

Doing Ministry in the Igbo Context: Towards an Emerging Model and Method for the Church in Africa arises out of reflection on experience and practice. The volume reflects on the author's own cultural context, religious heritage, and pastoral functioning. In addition, it considers the author's personal experiences in relation to the common experiences of others within the author's cultural and religious traditions and places these experiences and the voices they represent into mutually critical correlation. Thus, commonalities and dissonances in them emerge leading to insights where to go from there in providing ministry to the People of God in the «local church» context and still within the framework of one universal church. This book presents a contextual model of local theology that begins its reflection with the Igbo cultural context. The Igbo or Nigerian or African Church can have a pattern of ministry with a model and a method that are consistent with the peoples' values. To accomplish this goal a local cultural value must be explored and brought into the scene. Since the Igbo society is the heart of Christianity and Catholicism in Africa, the author relies on Igboland as his situational context. The exploration of the indigenous Igbo value of collaboration will be an advantage in ministering to the rest of the African people who have cultural resemblances to Igbos. The African Church has to learn from the Igbo values of umunna bu ike. Umunna is the basic Igbo unit, and possibly the most powerful missionary force in Igboland, and potentially an Igbo gift to the Church in Nigeria and Africa, and even beyond.

Winner of the 2016 Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries. Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights. A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.

Interface between Igbo Theology and Christianity is a timely book that provides new scholarly thinking concerning the convergence of Christianity and Igbo Traditional Religion taking place in the Igbo culture area. This book, a fruit of multidisciplinary conversation among Igbo scholars and Igbophiles, offers concepts, themes, issues, and case studies with deep ethnographic details, some of which do not exist anywhere else in print. It is a major statement of how modern Igbo scholars, social scientists, philosophers, theologians, liturgists, and active pastors and parish priests, understand the intersection of Igbo Traditional Religion and Christianity in postcolonial Nigeria. The editors and authors of the chapters of this book draw from their wealth of experience to offer to students, scholars, researchers, community-based organizations and NGOs, and practitioners in interfaith dialogue a “must have” manual to engage in and develop mutual respect and trust among Christian denominations and between them and Igbo Traditional Religion. This book will serve as a blueprint for a deep dialogue among the Igbo in both city and rural settings, in the context of clan and community life context and in the Christian parish setting. The book will certainly appeal to numerous communities in Africa wishing to share similar local experiences and collective memories, but which do not have the channels to talk about themselves in scholarly writing.

It is the conviction of Sacramentum Caritatis as well as the fathers of the Second Vatican Council that active participation at Eucharistic celebration cannot be easily disassociated from active involvement in the Church's mission in the world. This present study in the light of the foregoing presuppositions, exposes some of such challenges confronting the Afro-Igbo Christian, with special focus on the menace of the osu caste system, and proposes ways towards its eradication. One of such ways remains strengthening the Eucharistic celebration through the process of the inculturation.

The authority-oriented pastoral/catechetical planning method, which characterizes the African mission transmission, has been problematic as it subtly neglects in its pedagogy the culture and daily life of the subject. Hence, the people operate a Christian/cultural double standard. This book proffers an alternative as the author makes the concept of the relationship hermeneutics model to a creative writing that aims towards an empirical application in the theology of inculturation, which is a subject-oriented and dialogical method that draws its strength from the incarnation prototype.