Author: Birgit Meyer Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474471005 Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
This book offers an ethnography of the emergence of a local Christianity and its relation to changing social, political and economic formations among the Peki Ewe in Ghana. Focusing on the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which arose from encounters between the Ewe and German Piestist missionaries, the author examines recent conflicts leading to the secession of many pentecostally oriented members, which it places in a historical perspective. The main argument is that, for the Ewe, involvement with modernity goes hand in hand with new enchantment, rather than disenchantment, of the world. At the grassroots level, the study focuses on the image of the Devil, which the missionaries communicated to the Ewe through translation and which currently receives much attention in the Pentecostal churches. It is shown that this image played and still plays a crucial role in the local appropriation of Christianity, since diabolisation confirmed the existence of local gods and witchcraft and incorporated them into Christian belief as demons. Comparing the discourses and practices of mission and Pentecostal churches, the study reveals that the latter pay much more attention to Satan - especially through 'deliverance' rituals. Pentecostalism's increasing popularity thus stems from the fact that it ties into historically generated local understandings of Christianity, which, despite a declared dislike of non-Christian religious practices, stand much closer to Ewe religion than missionary Christianity. With its emphasis on the hybrid image of the Devil and people's obsessions with occult forces as a way to mediate the attractions and discontents of modernity, this book sheds light on a hitherto neglected dimension in studies of African Christianity.
Author: Jeffrey Burton Russell Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801497186 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
Mephistopheles is the fourth and final volume of Jeffrey Burton Russell's critically acclaimed history of the concept of the Devil, continuing in this volume the story from the Reformation to the present.
Author: Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps Publisher: AOSIS ISBN: 1779952325 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
In this book, it is argued that narratives about Satanism, which have become popular in the Christian context of Zambia from the 1990s onwards, make cultural sense because of their links to traditional African notions as well as contemporary Christian theologies. These narratives also resonate with unease regarding the cultural change, which is connected by Zambians to modernity. Narratives about Satanism further make personal sense to their narrators, the pastors who provide a platform for them, and their audiences. These arguments contribute to the academic study of religion in Africa, in particular of African Christianity and of witchcraft-related phenomena, as well as to the global study of discourses on Satanism and other conspiracy theories. All of these disciplines are related to the topic of Satanism in Zambia, but the phenomenon itself has not been discussed at length, which makes the existing academic literature incomplete and inadequate. The comprehensive focus on the case of narratives about Satanism in Zambia offers new insights and enhances current theoretical reflection. The research presented in this book is original, carried out during fieldwork spanning from 2012 to 2017 in Zambia and literature study in the years after that. Methodologically, the research is based on participant observation in churches in which testimonies of ex-Satanists were presented, as well as participation in the Fingers of Thomas, a Roman Catholic group which investigates rumours about Satanism. Furthermore, it is based on interviews with pastors and students of theology active in the deliverance ministry from Pentecostal as well as mainline churches and also on interviews with people who have had experiences of Satanism. Finally, the research is based on an analysis of collected testimonies of ex-Satanists as they were presented in these interviews, in churches, on radio programmes, in newspapers and in other sources.
Author: Elochukwu Uzukwu, C.S.Sp. Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271098651 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
By the time the Capuchins arrived in the seventeenth century, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two hundred years. The European mission could not be conversion, then, but reinforcement; the Capuchins sought to establish the sacraments and a line to Rome in a lay-led church already suffused with an enduring, creative, and complex theological culture. In Memorializing the Unsung, Elochukwu Uzukwu uses the framework of this “ancient” Kongo Catholicism to explore European dependence on enslaved Kongo Catholics and the unconscionable Capuchin and Spiritan participation in the slave trade at large—a practice denounced by the lone voices of Capuchin Epifanio de Moirans and Spiritan Alexandre Monnet. Reconstructing the church that missionaries and Kongo Catholics built together on the foundations of local religion, Memorializing the Unsung contrasts the dignity denied the Kongo Catholics with the freedom they nonetheless performed. Uzukwu is particularly deft in tracing the agency of Kongo elites and laypeople from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, carefully evaluating their deliberate engagements with southern Europeans, the role of the maestri (translator-catechists) in guiding the faithful, and the ultimate development of a unique theological vocabulary endorsed by the Kikongo catechism. Without the support and creativity of these unsung lay Catholics across west-central and eastern Africa, Uzukwu shows, the European missions in the region would have failed. Even while enslaved, the Kongo Slaves of the Church and the eastern African Slaves of the Mission served as mediators, co-creators, and reinventors of their world.
Author: Chad Bird Publisher: New Reformation Publications ISBN: 1948969815 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Most of us are regular people who have good days and bad days. Our lives are radically ordinary and unexciting. That means they're the kind of lives God gets excited about. While the world worships beauty and power and wealth, God hides his glory in the simple, the mundane, the foolish, working in unawesome people, things, and places.In our day of celebrity worship and online posturing, this is a refreshing, even transformative way of understanding God and our place in his creation. It urges us to treasure a life of simplicity, to love those whom the world passes by, to work for God's glory rather than our own. And it demonstrates that God has always been the Lord of the cross--a Savior who hides his grace in unattractive, inglorious places.Your God Is Too Glorious reminds readers that while a quiet life may look unimpressive to the world, it's the regular, everyday people that God tends to use to do his most important work.
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky Publisher: Alma Classics ISBN: 9781847496416 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
As ideological ferment grips Russia, a small group of revolutionaries, led by Pyotr Verkhovensky and inspired by Nikolai Stavrogin, plan to spread destruction and anarchy throughout the country. Morally bankrupt, they are prepared to use whatever means necessary to achieve their goal, including murder and incitement to suicide. But when they are forced to test the limits of their doctrine and kill one of their own to secure the secrecy of their mission, the ragtag group breaks up in mutual recrimination. Devils is at once a compelling political statement and a study of atheism and its calamitous effect on a country that is teetering on the edge of an abyss. Seen as Dostoevsky's most powerful indictment of man's propensity to violence, this darkly humorous work, shot through with grotesque comedy, is presented here in Roger Cockrell's masterful new translation.
Author: Birgit Meyer
Author: Birgit Meyer
Author: Jeffrey Burton Russell
Author: ![The Devil, His Greatness and Decadence. From the French by A. R. [Translated, with Prefatory Notes, by H. A.] PDF](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/_5F5yLCLVMgC?fife=w80-h100)
Author: Albert RÉVILLE
Author: 
Author: Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps
Author: Elochukwu Uzukwu, C.S.Sp.
Author: Chad Bird
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky