Christian Reflection In Africa

This reference collection presents academic reviews of more than twelve-hundred contemporary Africa-related publications relevant for informed Christian reflection in and about Africa. The collection is based on the review journal BookNotes for Africa, a specialist resource dedicated to bringing to notice such publications, and furnishing them with a one-paragraph description and evaluation. Now assembled here for the first time is the entire collection of reviews through the first thirty issues of the journal’s history. The core intention, both of the journal and of this compilation, is to encourage and to facilitate informed Christian reflection and engagement in Africa, through a thoughtful encounter with the published intellectual life of the continent. Reviews have been provided by a team of more than one hundred contributors drawn from throughout Africa and overseas. The books and other media selected for review represent a broad cross-section of interests and issues, of personalities and interpretations, including the secular as well as the religious. The collection will be of special interest to academic scholars, theological educators, libraries, ministry leaders, and specialist researchers in Africa and throughout the world, but will also engage any reader looking for a convenient resource relating to modern Africa and Christian presence there.

I would urge everyone to receive this book with openness and understanding. Written by an African Christian woman, it is a serious attempt to speak of the fullness of the Gospel to the specific African context. As one individual's struggle to give account of the hope that lies in her, it is a passionate and sincere work, and a welcome contribution to the growing genre of religious literature known as liberation theology. The author seeks not only to speak to us but also to move us and bring us to different ways of 'hearing and knowing.' She has succeeded with me. -Lamin Sanneh Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University This book is a remarkable synthesis of history, theology, and missions. It is one of the most important books of the decade because it is written by a Ghanian Christian woman who resides in Nigeria and has travelled the world-over demanding that we no longer allow traditional theological puzzles to go unexamined. Oduyoye's writings are like a breath of fresh air to women in ministry and in the church. -Katie G. Cannon Episcopal Divinity School Amber Oduyoye is Africa's leading woman theologian. In this book we meet a woman of faith reflecting in a scholarly and meditative way on Christianity in Africa. Learned in both the Western and African theological traditions, Professor Oduyoye brings constructive criticism to bear on each in the interest of promoting a wider community of wholeness. -Peter J. Paris Princeton Theological Seminary

A comprehensive look at the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa, this volume features contributions from noted scholars from across the continent and beyond, providing badly needed social analysis and theological reflection from an African perspective.

Through seven dominant voices in Black academic theology, Gospel Haymanot sheds new light on biblical authority issues, doctrinal orthodoxy, and evangelical theology on justice and liberation, which engage the Black Christian experience.

In this book, African Christian theology is introduced as a Kpelelogical reflection about life in the context of Africa, which exists in the context of the cosmos. Kpelelogy is the ontological mode of being grasped by the agape of God in Christ by grace through faith in the power of the Holy Spirit. By this mode, African theology is introduced by way of a definition, a principle of paradox, and a description, as well as a critical view of the works of African theologians. It examines the issues of method, criteria, and sources of doing theology in Africa and introduces the method of Kpelelogy as an African theological method. This is explored further as a holistic theological method that is conscious of its being in existence, and its life in history, that is driven by faith in the triune God in a pneumatic experience that has been termed in this book as the Kpelelogical ontological mode. The book is ecumenical in view of its engagement with Christian tradition. It presents a Kpelelogical theology that is concretely African and universally Christian in the Okpelejen Wulormor—the cosmic Jesus Christ who is and was, but beyond the munus triplex (Priest, King and Prophet, threefold office of Jesus Christ) that is to come. Hence it is a theology which embraces elements of Reformed, Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox theological insights in the African context.

At a time when Africans, like other peoples, are facing the shock of technological and cultural modernity, liberation of the oppressed must be the primary condition for an authentic inculturation of the Christian message. This is the central axis of the papers in this book, which begins with the questions of faith posed by cultural variables, an internal dimension of the African's condition. In order to understand what is at stake, we need to place these matters in the overall context of a society and a history marked by conflicts-which lead to a rereading of our African memory. The basic issue of the Credibility of Christianity is being raised from with in the dynamic which allows Africans to escape from the inhumanity of the destiny to which certain factors would condemn them. So critical reflection on the relevance of an African Christianity requires us to identify the structures or strategies of exploitation and impoverishment against which Africans have always struggled, finding their own specific forms of resistance within their cultures.