‘Vex the devil’: Scripture, God-talk and holiness at Villa Road

AbstractThis article gives a critical account of the engagement with Scripture among a group of women and men from the Villa Road Methodist Church, Handsworth, Birmingham, UK. It presents research done in community during 2004/05 for the unpublished thesis, ‘Mary in the Kitchen, Martha in the Pew: Patterns of Holiness in a Methodist Church’ (MPhil., Birmingham, 2006), updated to include critical engagement with contemporary scholarship in Black British theology, womanist and feminist theology, holiness teaching and hermeneutics, and congregational studies. Working from ethnographic research, the article considers three clusters of emphasis, or creative tensions, in the use of Scripture: gender and God, thanksgiving/resistance in response to evil, and displacement/home-coming. The article argues that these themes specially concern the negotiation of identity and relationship between self, God, Scripture and context.

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Haiti’s Pact with the Devil?: Bwa Kayiman, Haitian Protestant Views of Vodou, and the Future of Haiti

Religions ◽

10.3390/rel10080464 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 10 (8) ◽

pp. 464

Author(s):

Bertin M. Louis Jr.

Keyword(s):

African Descent ◽

Haitian Revolution ◽

Global South ◽

Ethnographic Research ◽

Negative Effects ◽

The Bahamas ◽

Internet Resources ◽

The Future ◽

The Haitian Revolution ◽

The Devil

This essay uses ethnographic research conducted among Haitian Protestants in the Bahamas in 2005 and 2012 plus internet resources to document the belief among Haitian Protestants (Haitians who practice Protestant forms of Christianity) that Haiti supposedly made a pact with the Devil (Satan) as the result of Bwa Kayiman, a Vodou ceremony that launched the Haitian Revolution (1791–1803). Vodou is the syncretized religion indigenous to Haiti. I argue that this interpretation of Bwa Kayiman is an extension of the negative effects of the globalization of American Fundamentalist Christianity in Haiti and, by extension, peoples of African descent and the Global South.

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Elaborating on ubuntu in a Johannesburg inner-city church

Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis ◽

10.30674/scripta.67462 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 26 ◽

pp. 366-78 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Elina Hankela

Keyword(s):

Inner City ◽

Research Methods ◽

Social Dynamics ◽

Ethnographic Research ◽

Moral Ideal ◽

Methodist Church ◽

Local Congregation ◽

The People ◽

The Social ◽

The Church

The article was originally delivered as the speech of the winner of the 2014 Donner Institute Prize for Outstanding Research into Religion, and deals with some core findings of the research that won the prize, namely, the doctoral thesis Challenging Ubuntu: Open Doors and Exclusionary Boundaries at the Central Methodist Mission in Johannesburg. The author approaches the meanings of ubuntu (Nguni: humanity/humanness) in the context of a Methodist church that sheltered thousands of African migrants in its premises in the inner city of Johannesburg. Using ethnographic research methods, she analyses both the inclusionary message of humanity preached at the church and the exclusionary boundaries between the people who lived in the church and the local congregation that worshipped there. Based on the social dynamics of the church community, the author suggests the rules of reciprocity and survival as some of the socio-moral patterns that set the boundaries to the actualisation of the moral ideal of ubuntu in this context. Overall, the case of this particular church speaks to a broader discussion of the meaning of and limits to being human in one world.

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Disappointment

10.5422/fordham/9780823278237.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Jarrett Zigon

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Critical Hermeneutics ◽

Ethnographic Research ◽

Drug War ◽

Call To Action ◽

Critical Engagement ◽

Political Implications ◽

Starting Point ◽

Central Argument ◽

Metaphysical Humanism

For many today politics is characterized above all else by disappointment. Inspired by years of ethnographic research with the global anti-drug war movement, Disappointment addresses this disappointment by offering a framework for a politics that rises to the demand of our radical finitude. A politics that rises to the demand of radical finitude is a politics that finds its problems, antagonists, motivations, strategies, tactics, in a word, its call to action, in a world grounded in nothing other than the situations and existents that constitute it. This book takes up the challenge of offering such a framework by showing how ontological starting points have real political implications. A central argument of World-Building is that what is normally called ontology, politics, and ethics are actually three aspects or modalities of the same tradition, and therefore a critical engagement with one necessitates a critical engagement with the other two; that is, with the ontological tradition as a whole. This realization allows us to see how an alternative ontological starting point may lead to alternative political and ethical possibilities. With this as its task, Disappointment offers a critical hermeneutics of the dominant ontological tradition of our time and does so by means of both deconstruction and conceptual creativity. The politics of world-building that results seeks to move beyond metaphysical humanism and its exhausted concepts such as rights, responsibility and dignity, and begin to enact an ontology of worlds by means of such concepts as situation, dwelling, and attunement.

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