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During the twentieth-century, Christendom shifted its centre of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere, Africa becoming the most significant area of church growth. This volume explores Christianity’s advance across the continent, and its capturing of the African imagination.
From the medieval Catholic Kingdom of Kongo to a transnational Pentecostal movement in post-colonial Zimbabwe, the chapters explore how African agents – priests and prophets, martyrs and missionaries, evangelists and catechists – have seized Christianity and made it theirs. Emphasizing popular religion, the book shows how the Christian ideas and texts, practices and symbols, which have been adapted by Africans, help them accept existential passions and empower them through faith to deal with material concerns for health and wealth, and to overcome evil.
From the medieval Catholic Kingdom of Kongo to a transnational Pentecostal movement in post-colonial Zimbabwe, the chapters explore how African agents – priests and prophets, martyrs and missionaries, evangelists and catechists – have seized Christianity and made it theirs. Emphasizing popular religion, the book shows how the Christian ideas and texts, practices and symbols, which have been adapted by Africans, help them accept existential passions and empower them through faith to deal with material concerns for health and wealth, and to overcome evil.
Price: $58.00
Pages: 422
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Studies of Religion in Africa
Publication Date:
02 May 2013
ISBN: 9789004245105
Format: Paperback
"Facing competition within the religious market-places of the world has ... always been the lot of both the missionaries and the churches they have helped to establish, with or without the spur of capitalist economics. That this was the case owes much to the African imagination; that it is now widely accepted is likewise the achievement of Adrian Hastings and the wider scholarship represented in this excellent volume." - Andrew Porter, King's College
David Maxwell is Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University and Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is author of Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s-1990s (1999) and African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (2006). He was long-time Editor of The Journal of Religion in Africa. He is currently writing a book about missionaries and African agents in the creation of colonial knowledge in colonial Belgian Congo and has edited with Patrick Harries, The Spiritual in the Secular. Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa (2012).
Ingrid Lawrie, BA in Jurisprudence, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. She was Editorial Assistant and Reviews Editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa for over twenty years until 2009.
Ingrid Lawrie, BA in Jurisprudence, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. She was Editorial Assistant and Reviews Editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa for over twenty years until 2009.