Some Current Trends of Christianity in Africa

This article examines three trends in current African Christianity. Its denominational fragmentation is currently marked by the coexistence of three major groups: the “churches that emerged from the apostolic process of Christian antiquity”; the “churches born from Western missionary processes”; and the “African revivalists” (African initiated churches and African Pentecostal churches). The African revivalists are characterized by doctrinal and institutional creativity that largely draws on Africa's historical trajectory, with its challenges of a sociocultural, identity, and economic nature. This “fragmented African Christianity” inevitably has a diverse view of African cultures, ranging from a positive viewpoint on one end of the scale and radical rejection on the other, and including various patterns of taking over Christian heritage with the goal of giving new value to the formally scorned African identity. This diversity of attitudes in turn prompts overall judgments on Christianity in Africa, which range from praise to suspicion regarding the pertinence of this religion on the continent. This complex shape of current African Christianity is not an obstacle to the Ad Gentes mission, whose current dynamism is increasingly marked by the phenomenon of African emigration. All of this represents a great challenge for ecumenism, because a trend toward a “religion market” is taking the lead over collaboration and search for Christian unity. This is why it is important to recognize the quality of this African missionary Christianity, whose fragmentation is quite original.     

Churched Ibiza: Evangelical Christianity and Club Culture

In this article, I trace the shifting theorisation of religious conflict to argue that religious conflict in the USA is shaped by a dialectic of religious and secular movements. Church-sect theory, which was originally a class-based theoretical framework, was appropriated by the rational choice approach in the sociology of religion, which instead privileged competition in a religious marketplace. Ernst Troeltsch described divisions between church and sect, but H. Richard Niebuhr demarcated a denominational divide in the USA based on class, region, ethnicity and race. In the 1980s, Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, Robert Wuthnow and James Davison Hunter observed that the differences in the US were no longer necessarily between denominations but could occur within denominations. For them, what had become known as the Culture Wars were based on a conflict between religious liberals/progressives and religious conservatives/orthodox. This conflict is shaped by a dialectic of secular and religious movements and counter-movements.     

基督宗教中国化的历史、文化与现实逻辑

习近平总书记一再强调,坚持我国宗教中国化方向,是中国宗教工作在新时代的新内容、新命题.宗教中国化既是历史文化传统与现实需要之间长期互动的一个过程,包括各大宗教历史上与中国社会彼此适应、与中华文化相互汇通以及与本土政治多方磨合等;也是在全球化背景下,中国与世界不同宗教全方位“重新相遇”以来出现的现实问题.毋庸讳言,当今各...     

Edward Wilmot Blyden's understanding of Christianity and Islam as instruments of black emancipation in West Africa

In the words of Leopold Senghor, Blyden (1832–1912), was ‘le premier et principal précurseur de la Nigritude comme de l‘African Personality’. For sixty years Blyden tried to persuade members of his own race (whom he consistently called Negroes) to exchange what he saw as their permanent subjugation by whites in the Americas for the prospect of liberation in their cultural home, Africa. His campaign prompted him to ask if either of the two major religious systems, Christianity and Islam, could serve the cause of black emancipation. How useful had they been in the past? How useful could they be in the future? Blyden's pragmatic, selective, approach to the two cases of institutionalized religion in West Africa is subjected to scrutiny.     

Christianity and Philosophy

Continental Philosophy Review -     

Christianity and Bakhtin

Book reviewed in this article:
Ruth Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author