During the twentieth-century, Christendom shifted its centre of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere, Africa becoming the most significant area of church growth. This volume explores Christianity’s advance across the continent, and its capturing of the African imagination. From the medieval Catholic Kingdom of Kongo to a transnational Pentecostal movement in post-colonial Zimbabwe, the chapters explore how African agents – priests and prophets, martyrs and missionaries, evangelists and catechists – have seized Christianity and made it theirs. Emphasizing popular religion, the book shows how the Christian ideas and texts, practices and symbols, which have been adapted by Africans, help them accept existential passions and empower them through faith to deal with material concerns for health and wealth, and to overcome evil.

Civil war, famine, genocide, AIDS--the peoples of Africa have endured horrific human tragedies. Those crises plus widespread economic, political, and social instability have combined to produce what some consider a dire and nearly hopeless situation. Even as this book was going to press, the leaders of the G-8 nations were meeting to talk about what could be done to "aid Africa" in these critical times. A careful look at history would indicate that the answer must come from within Africa and from the African people themselves, not from other nations or the economic programs and solutions they propose. The rapid rise of a Christian social ethics movement as an alternative perspective focused precisely on addressing Africa's challenges using the spiritual resources of its own people is providing a hopeful solution and a timely and powerful coping mechanism for African peoples. One of the leaders of this movement is Emmanuel Katongole, a Catholic priest from Uganda. In A Future for Africa, Katongole wrestles with concrete problems like the AIDS epidemic and widespread military conflicts, as well as fundamental, systemic ones, like poverty, corruption, and tribalism. He then offers faith-filled solutions based on the power and example of Christian community and Christian moral imagination. Katongole's radical message is that a political ethic based on Christian principles as taught in the Scriptures is the necessary foundation for healing, reconciliation, and rebuilding the continent.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentation-social, spatial, and racial-that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals. Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race. Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.

Religion is often seen as a conservative force in contemporary Africa. In particular, Christian beliefs and actors are usually depicted as driving the opposition to homosexuality and LGBTI rights in African societies. This book nuances that picture, by drawing attention to discourses emerging in Africa itself that engage with religion, specifically Christianity, in progressive and innovative ways--in support of sexual diversity and the quest for justice for LGBTI people. The authors show not only that African Christian traditions harbor strong potential for countering conservative anti-LGBTI dynamics; but also that this potential has already begun to be realized, by various thinkers, activists and movements across the continent. Their ten case studies document how leading African writers are reimagining Christian thought; how several Christian-inspired groups are transforming religious practice; and how African cultural production creatively appropriates Christian beliefs and symbols. In short, the book explores Christianity as a major resource for a liberating imagination and politics of sexuality and social justice in Africa today. Foregrounding African agency and progressive religious thought, this highly original intervention counterbalances our knowledge of secular approaches to LGBTI rights in Africa, and powerfully decolonizes queer theory, theology and politics.

On July 9, 2011, South Sudan celebrated its independence as the world's newest nation, an occasion that the country's Christian leaders claimed had been foretold in the Book of Isaiah. The Bible provided a foundation through which the South Sudanese could distinguish themselves from the Arab and Muslim Sudanese to the north and understand themselves as a spiritual community now freed from their oppressors. Less than three years later, however, new conflicts emerged along ethnic lines within South Sudan, belying the liberation theology that had supposedly reached its climactic conclusion with independence. In Chosen Peoples, Christopher Tounsel investigates the centrality of Christian worldviews to the ideological construction of South Sudan and the inability of shared religion to prevent conflict. Exploring the creation of a colonial-era mission school to halt Islam's spread up the Nile, the centrality of biblical language in South Sudanese propaganda during the Second Civil War (1983--2005), and postindependence transformations of religious thought in the face of ethnic warfare, Tounsel highlights the potential and limitations of deploying race and Christian theology to unify South Sudan.

Apologetics, the defense of the Faith, shows why our Christian faith is true—but it’s much more than that. Apologetics isn’t just the province of scholars and saints, but of ordinary men and women: parents, teachers, lay ministry leaders, pastors, and everyone who wants to develop a stronger faith, to understand why we believe what we believe, to know Our Lord better, and love him more fully. In Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith, Holly Ordway shows how an imaginative approach—in cooperation with rational arguments—is extremely valuable in helping people come to faith in Christ. Making a case for the role of imagination in apologetics, this book proposes ways to create meaning for Christian language in a culture that no longer understands words like ‘sin’ or ‘salvation,' suggests how to discern and address the manipulation of language, and shows how metaphor and narrative work in powerful ways to communicate the truth. It applies these concepts to specific, key apologetics issues, including suffering, doubt, and longing for meaning and beauty. Apologetics and the Christian Imagination shows how Christians can harness the power of the imagination to share the Faith in meaningful, effective ways.

Apologetics, the rational defense of the Christian faith in a public context, using the language of philosophy, is traditionally associated with either Roman Catholic theology or Evangelicalism. The contributors to this book seek to (re-)claim Christian apologetics in an Anglican Catholic context. The book originated in a number of successful Apologetics summer schools at St Stephen's College Oxford which generated interest in the rediscovery of apologetics in the context of today's Church. A star cast of authors from a variety of backgrounds offer constructive reflections on subjects such as what is Apologetics?; common objections to the Christian Faith; atheism; apologetics and contemporary culture and apologetics in the parish. Contributors include: Graham Ward (Manchester, Alister McGrath (King's College London), Alison Milbank (Nottingham) and Robin Ward (Oxford).