Seventh Day Adventist Contributions To East Africa 1903 1983

The Seventh-day Adventist Church initiated its mission activities in East Africa in 1903. Sending missionaries mainly from Germany, England, and Scandinavia, European Adventists began a long and rich mission tradition in the region. Not only in religion but also in the fields of education, health, literacy, medicine, and social affairs important contributions have been made. The subject presented gives some interesting insights into modern missiology.

Journal of Asian and African Studies is continued as African and Asian Studies. See https://brill.com/view/journals/aas/aas-overview.xml for more information.

Seventh-day Adventism was born as a radical millenarian sect in nineteenth-century America. It has since spread across the world, achieving far more success in Latin America, Africa, and Asia than in its native land. In what seems a paradox, Adventist expectation of Christ’s imminent return has led the denomination to develop extensive educational, publishing, and health systems. Increasingly established within a variety of societies, Adventism over time has modified its views on many issues and accommodated itself to the “delay” of the Second Advent. In the process, it has become a multicultural religion that nonetheless reflects the dominant influence of its American origins. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Seventh-Day Adventists covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on key people, cinema, politics and government, sports, and critics of Ellen White. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Seventh-day Adventism.

This book examines the complex history of Adventism in Africa, situating it within the context of African traditions and culture. From a small movement with origins in the United States, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has grown worldwide. It is one of several Christian denominations present in Africa and yet the history of Seventh-day Adventism in the global South has been largely unexplored by scholars. The book highlights the discrepancies between western traditions exhibited in the missionary enterprise and African religious systems. It also explores the intricate relation between colonialism and African Adventism in line with established studies in African Christianity. It will be of interest to scholars of religion and theology, particularly church history and mission studies, as well as African studies.

In recent years, millions of people have joined churches such as the Seventh-day Adventist which prosper enormously in different parts of the world. The Road to Clarity is one of the first ethnographic in-depth studies of this phenomenon. It is a vivid account based on almost two years of participation in ordinary church members' daily religious and non-religious lives. The book offers a fascinating inquiry into the nature of long-term commitment to Adventism among rural people in Madagascar. Eva Keller argues that the key attraction of the church lies in the excitement of study, argument and intellectual exploration. This is a novel approach which challenges utilitarian and cultural particularist explanations of the success of this kind of Christianity.

A comprehensive collection of Seventh-day Adventist texts and statements on interchurch and interfaith relations. With more than 16 million baptized members and about 30 million adherents in total today, this church is a global Christian movement. It attempts to document a phenomenon found in other less ecumenically inclined denominations as well.

The edited volume elaborates on a range of themes that emerged during a workshop of the 8th biennial of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Vienna in 2004. Among these themes are: the paradoxical permanence of ‘transition’ in post-communist countries, the accompanying persistence of social suffering and the structural conditions that give rise to it. A final theme focuses on the re­sources that people mobilize to cope with suffering and trauma. Ways of coping manifest a stance towards agency shared by sufferers from diverse post-communist regions, such as ethnically divided Croatia, politically and economically unstable Zimbabwe, relatively more peaceful countries such as Hungary, Poland and Slovenia, and, finally, two religiously unique areas in Siberia, Russia. Ethnographic accounts from these diverse settings testify that agency has often involved relinquishing reliance on one’s self and turning towards a power higher than the self, whether this is conceptualized through the lens of transcendence, religion, or cosmology.