Interpretation of Scripture occurs within one’s worldview and culture, which enhances our understanding and ability to apply Scripture in the world. However, few books address Bible interpretation from an African perspective and no other textbook uses the intercultural approach found here. This book brings both an awareness of how one’s African context gives a lens to hermeneutics, but also how to interpret texts with integrity despite our cultural influences. African Hermeneutics was born of Prof Elizabeth Mburu’s frustration at only having textbooks that predominantly followed a Western worldview to teach her African students. Mburu’s approach to hermeneutics is one that begins in Africa, moving from the known to the unknown as students learn to apply her ‘four-legged stool model’ to biblical texts, namely examining: the parallels to African contexts, the theological context, the literary context, and the historical and cultural context. This textbook will help students and pastors interpret Scripture with greater accuracy in their own context, allowing for faithful application in their local contexts.

This collection interrogates and engages the biblical text, colonial and postcolonial subjectivities and cultural assumptions, as well as lived experiences that encompass varying Africana contexts and Diasporas. In order to do this, it deploys methodologies, exegetical analyses and critical and constructive communal epistemologies. Framed by historical, literary, cultural and theological engagements of issues around wealth and power, gender, sexualities and masculinities, HIV and AIDS, as well as the crises of war and mass violence, the book will be very useful for students, academics, clergy and laity committed to Africana-conscious epistemologies and methodologies, and the impact on biblical studies.

Hermeneutics is a crucial but neglected perspective in African philosophy. Here, Tsenay Serequeberhan engages post-colonial African literature and the ideas of the African liberation struggle with critically-used insights from the European philosophical tradition. Continuing the work of Theophilus Okere and Okonda Okolo, this book attempts to overcome the debate between ethnophilosophy and professional philosophy, demonstrating that the promise of African philosophy lies with the critical development of the African hermeneutical perspective.

This book has six chapters: The first Chapter deals with a brief history on the genesis of African Feminist theologies as an 'irruption within an irruption' of Feminist theological movements in the world including a reflection on its relationship to the secular Feminist Movement, and to similar theologies such as Contextual Theology, Liberation Theology and the Holiness Feminist Movement. The second chapter deals with an introduction to African Feminist Hermeneutics. In this chapter, the three branches of African Feminist Hermeneutics, the general theories, principles and approaches to African Feminist Hermeneutics are highlighted. The third chapter deals with an Evangelical Feminist Biblical Hermeneutics of the Old Testament. The fourth chapter deals with an Evangelical Feminist Biblical Hermeneutics of the New Testament. The fifth is about how Malawian Christian women interpret culture, Bible and power relations to realise their own liberation and chapter 6 concludes the book.

How can we account for the power of ritual? This is the guiding question of Black Critics and Kings, which examines how Yoruba forms of ritual and knowledge shape politics, history, and resistance against the state. Focusing on "deep" knowledge in Yoruba cosmology as an interpretive space for configuring difference, Andrew Apter analyzes ritual empowerment as an essentially critical practice, one that revises authoritative discourses of space, time, gender, and sovereignty to promote political—-and even violent—-change. Documenting the development of a Yoruba kingdom from its nineteenth-century genesis to Nigeria's 1983 elections and subsequent military coup, Apter identifies the central role of ritual in reconfiguring power relations both internally and in relation to wider political arenas. What emerges is an ethnography of an interpretive vision that has broadened the horizons of local knowledge to embrace Christianity, colonialism, class formation, and the contemporary Nigerian state. In this capacity, Yoruba òrìsà worship remains a critical site of response to hegemonic interventions. With sustained theoretical argument and empirical rigor, Apter answers critical anthropologists who interrogate the possibility of ethnography. He reveals how an indigenous hermeneutics of power is put into ritual practice—-with multiple voices, self-reflexive awareness, and concrete political results. Black Critics and Kings eloquently illustrates the ethnographic value of listening to the voice of the other, with implications extending beyond anthropology to engage leading debates in black critical theory.

This book presents proponents of five approaches to biblical hermeneutics and allows them to respond to each other. The five approaches are the historical-critical/grammatical (Craig Blomberg), redemptive-historical (Richard Gaffin), literary/postmodern (Scott Spencer), canonical (Robert Wall) and philosophical/theological (Merold Westphal) views.