Past Pentecostalism: Notes on Rupture, Realignment, and Everyday Life in Pentecostal and African Independent Churches

Africa ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Engelke

Pentecostal studies has been one of the most vibrant areas of research in Africa for over twenty years, but is it time we started to look past Pentecostalism? Using some of the most important work in this tradition as a point of departure, this article offers both a critique of and supplement to the Pentecostal literature. It focuses in particular on how we should understand the relationship between Pentecostalism and African Independency by pushing the debates on how to frame their oft-shared desire to ‘break with the past’. Every rupture is also a realignment and how each is conceptualized and understood is a matter not only of discourse but decisions and dilemmas faced in everyday life.

2018 ◽  

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.


1997 ◽  
Vol 44 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 274-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Longhurst ◽  
Mike Savage

Bourdieu's work has been an important point of departure for recent analyses of the relationship between social class and consumption practices. This chapter takes stock of Bourdieu's influence and explores some problems which have become apparent—often in spite of Bourdieu's own hopes and general views. We point to the way that Bourdieu's influence has led to an approach to consumption which focuses on the consumption practices of specific occupational classes and on examining variations in consumption practice between such occupational groups. We argue that it this approach has a series of problems and suggest the need to broaden analyses of consumption to consider issues of ‘everyday life’, sociation, and social networks.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mookgo Solomon Kgatle

The name African Independent Churches (AICs) refers to churches that have been independently started in Africa by Africans and not by missionaries from another continent.There has been extensive research on (AICs) from different subjects in the past. There is, however, a research gap on the subject of leadership in the AICs, especially with reference to women leaders. To address this gap, this article discusses leadership in the AICs with special reference to the leadership of Christina Nku in St John’s Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM). A historical examination of Christina Nku’s leadership is studied by looking at her roles as a family woman, prophet, church founder, faith healer and educator in St John’s AFM. The aim of this article is twofold. First it is to reflect on gender in the leadership of the AICs. Second it is to apply the framework of leadership in the AICs to Christina Nku’s leadership in St John’s AFM. Consequently, the article is an interface between gender and leadership in an African context. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that Christina Nku was a remarkable woman in the leadership of the AICs.


Author(s):  
Josiah Ulysses Young

This chapter examines divine revelation in West Africa and Central Africa, with a historical focus on the relation of biblical beliefs to African traditional religions. It discusses the African independent churches, specifically the Église de Jésus-Christ sur la Terre par le Prophète Simon Kimbangu; Vincent Mulago’s essay in Des prêtres noirs s’interrogent (1956); specific essays from the book Biblical Revelation and African Beliefs (1969); and Engelbert Mveng’s book L’Art d’Afrique noire: liturgie cosmique et langage religieux (1964). The chapter also examines the recent scholarship of the Ghanaian theologian Mercy Oduyoye and the Congolese scholars Oscar Bimwenyi-Kweshi and Kä Mana. Regarding the relationship between divine revelation and African traditional religions, it discusses J. B. Danquah’s book The Akan Doctrine of God (1944), the arguments of the Congolese Egyptologist Mubabinge Bilolo, and the West African scholar Ntumba Museka.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Sigrún Alba Sigurðardóttir

The past 20 years have seen a shift in Icelandic photography from postmodern aesthetics towards a more phenomenological perspective that explores the relationship between subjective and affective truth on the one hand, and the outside world on the other hand. Rather than telling a story about the world as it is or as the photographer wants it to appear, the focus is on communicating with the world, and with the viewer. The photograph is seen as a creative medium that can be used to reflect how we experience and make sense of the world, or how we are and dwell in the world. In this paper, I introduce the theme of poetic storytelling in the context of contemporary photography in Iceland and other Nordic Countries. Poetic storytelling is a term I have been developing to describe a certain lyrical way to use a photograph as a narrative medium in reaction to the climate crisis and to a general lack of relation to oneself and to the world in times of increased acceleration in the society. In my article I analyze works by a few leading Icelandic photographers (Katrín Elvarsdóttir, Heiða Helgadóttir and Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir) and put them in context with works by artists from Denmark (Joakim Eskildsen, Christina Capetillo and Astrid Kruse Jensen), Sweden (Helene Schmitz) and Finland (Hertta Kiiski) artists within the frame of poetic storytelling. Poetic storytelling is about a way to use a photograph as a narrative medium in an attempt to grasp a reality which is neither fully objective nor subjective, but rather a bit of both.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wentzel C. Coetzer

Self-forgiveness – A neglected area within the pastorate: The scientific study of the theme of forgiveness in general, has only begun to gain momentum during the 1970s – it is thus a relatively new concept within the helping professions. Since the sub-discipline of positive psychology has also gained momentum over the past number of years, it has largely contributed to a more realistic approach to the concept of forgiveness. However, within this broad context of the development of research on the theme of forgiveness, the specific aspect of self-forgiveness did not come to fruition from the very onset and was even occasionally described as the ’stepchild’ of research on forgiveness. In this article, we focus on four of the most prominent pastoral-psychological models of self-forgiveness. Aspects that are discussed in this regard are some important definitions, the relationship between interpersonal and intrapersonal forgiveness, characteristics indicating a lack of forgiveness, factors that necessitate self-forgiveness and barriers to self-forgiveness. The basic point of departure in this article is that of a literature study regarding the theme of self-forgiveness. Particular attention is given to the approaches within the abovementioned four models, while data from other relevant sources are also incorporated. Finally, from the various models as well as supplementary literature, several strategic moments regarding the facilitation of self-forgiveness are identified. The importance and topicality of the theme of self-forgiveness, which has been ignored for quite a long period, becomes very evident from this research – for the helping professions and for the pastorate specifically.


Pragmatics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Harper ◽  
Sean Rintel ◽  
Rod Watson ◽  
Kenton O’Hara

Abstract This paper identifies salient properties of how talk about video communication is organised interactionally, and how this interaction invokes an implied order of behaviour that is treated as ‘typical’ and ‘accountably representative’ of video communication. This invoked order will be called an interrogative gaze. This is an implied orientation to action, one that is used as a jointly managed interpretative schema that allows video communication to be talked about and understood as rationally, purposively and collaboratively undertaken in particular, ‘known in common’ ways. This applies irrespective of whether the actions in question are prospective (are about to happen) or have been undertaken in the past and are being accounted for in the present or are ‘generally the case’ – in current talk. The paper shows how this constitutive device also aids in sense making through such things as topic management in video-mediated interaction, and in elaborating the salience of the relationship between this and the patterned governance of social affairs – viz, mother-daughter, friend-friend – as normatively achieved outcomes. It will be shown how the interrogative gaze is variously appropriate and consequentially invoked not just in terms of what is done in a video call or making such calls accountable, but in helping articulate different orders of connection between persons, and how these orders have implications for sensible and appropriate behaviour in video calling and hence, for the type of persons who are involved. This, in turn, explains how a decision to avoid using video communication is made an accountably reasonable thing to do. The relevance of these findings for the sociology of everyday life and the philosophy of action are explored.


2014 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 294-306
Author(s):  
Michael Ashby

Over the past three decades, the study of material culture has become a pervasive feature of historical scholarship. From art to shoes, from porcelain to glass, ‘things’ are increasingly viewed as a useful medium through which to reconstruct what mattered to historical actors in everyday life. Taking its lead from this vast scholarship, this discussion examines how material culture was integrated into a programme of devotion, edification and religious instruction within England’s episcopal palaces, a group of buildings in which the relationship between the material and the spiritual was particularly fraught. Adopting a long chronological span, from 1500 to 1800, it analyses how that relationship evolved into the eighteenth century, a period noted for its proliferation of things and apparently ‘secular’ character.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Okwudiri Obineche

Jansenism is a seventh-century religious movement within the Roman Catholic Church, named after a Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen, whose work Augustinus (1640) reviewed the major thoughts of Augustine’s theology. Jansenist teachings were associated with harsh moral rigorism against the Jesuits’ Molinist thoughts. It was first condemned by Pope Innocent X in 1653, and finally in 1713 with many French migrants finding refuge in Holland from persecution. However, having retained traces of its teachings in the same Catholic Church that condemned them, Jansenist thoughts have found flourishing ground in the modern churches of Africa, especially among the African indigenous Pentecostal denominations in Nigeria. This indigenous Pentecostal tradition comprises the African Independent Churches, the Aladura movement, and the African Pentecostal movement, whose belief and practices are in line with the five pillars of Jansenism. This work, therefore, proposes that the reality of history lies with the future; whose interpretation of the past is proved by modern reality, and not by the ancient traditions


1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
J.J. Kritzinger

In the South African population censuses of the past the thousands of African Independent Churches were all classified and tabled together in one category. Since 1980 only one, the Zion Christian Church, has been identified separately. Previous statistics did not make it possible to know which of these churches were the larger ones, where they were based and which groups were growing as these statistics were very general. This article gives the reasoning behind the proposal made to the Central Statistical Services to enumerate some of these churches separately, and to classify the more or less 4 500 churches into a number of categories on the basis of their stated names.


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