| Description |
This seminar explores the dynamic encounters between Christianity and traditional African religious beliefs and practices, tracing how these interactions continue to shape identity, and social life across the continent. Rather than viewing Christianity and African religiosities as separate or oppositional systems, the course highlights the creativity, negotiation, and mutual influence that has taken place among these belief systems since the very beginning of the Christian faith. Beginning with historical encounters, we examine how Christianity was received, reinterpreted, and indigenized, becoming in some cases a religious tradition rooted in African cosmologies, ritual practices, and social structures. Attention then shifts to contemporary African Christianities, with a particular focus on Pentecostal and charismatic movements. These traditions are explored as sites where notions of spirit, healing, power, and salvation are reimagined within African cosmovisions. Themes such as spirit possession, therapeutic worship, and empowerment are analyzed not as exotic features but as lived religious expressions that respond to everyday realities, including illness, gendered imbalances, and socio-economic pressures. The course also considers the transformative processes of African Christianity, including the renewal of historical evangelical movements and the religious strategies of diasporic African Christian communities. Through ethnographic case studies, historical analysis, and systematic reflection, students will engage questions of syncretism, continuity, agency, and transculturation. By the end of the seminar, students will understand African Christianity as a field where Christian and Indigenous assumptions about spirit, power, community, and personhood are constantly negotiated. |
User:
Öffentlicher Bereich
Support