Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford Studies in World Christianity)

Long the dominant religion of the West, Christianity is now rapidly becoming the principal faith in much of the postcolonial world--a development that marks a momentous shift in the religion's very center of gravity. In this eye-opening book, Lamin Sanneh examines the roots of this "post-Western awakening" and the unparalleled richness and diversity, as well as the tension and conflict, it has brought to World Christianity. Tracing Christianity's rise from its birth on the edge of the Roman empire--when it proclaimed itself to be a religion for the entire world, not just for one people, one time, and one place--to its key role in Europe's maritime and colonial expansion, Sanneh sheds new light on the ways in which post-Western societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were drawn into the Christian orbit. Ultimately, he shows, these societies outgrew Christianity's colonial forms and restructured it through their own languages and idioms--a process that often occurred outside, and sometimes against, the lines of denominational control. The effect of such changes, Sanneh contends, has been profound, transforming not only worship, prayer, and the interpretation of Scripture, but also art, aesthetics, and music associated with the church. In exploring this story of Christianity's global expansion and its current resurgence in the non-Western world, Sanneh pays close attention to such issues as the faith's encounters with Islam and indigenous religions, as well as with secular ideologies such as Marxism and nationalism. He also considers the challenges that conservative, non-Western forms of Christianity pose to Western liberal values and Enlightenment ideas. Here then is a groundbreaking study of Christianity's role in cultural innovation and historical change--and must reading for all who are concerned with the present and future of the faith.

History

Sanneh, Lamin O.

Africa

Oxford University Press

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (American Society of Missiology Series)

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Orbis Books

Does religion reinforce the balkanization of cultural attitudes or does it help people transcend their culture? A noted scholar of world Christianity, Lamin Sanneh offers Westerners a perspective on such questions, a way to test the religio-cultural water and air in which they live. He shows how modernity has made of moderns "cultural believers" and "religious agnostics," and how the stubborn refusal to confront this bias in both secular and religious culture depletes both Christianity and Western culture.

Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process : The African Dimension (World Christian Theology Series)

The Jakhanke: The History of an Islamic Clerical People of the Senegambia (African Ethnographic Studies of the 20th Century)

Reference

Routledge

When originally published in 1979, this was the first comprehensive study of the Jakhanke in any language. Despite the 19th ambience of jihad, the Jakhanke maintined their tradition of consistent pacifism and political neutrality which is unique in Muslim Black Africa. Drawing on histories, interviews, and colonial reports the book traces the details of the Jakhanke pilgrimages and analyses important themes such as their system of education, their function as dream-interpreters and amulet-makers and finally the dependence of their way of life on the institution of slavery.

Here is a provocative analysis of culture in all of its variety, including especially the relationship of religion and Christianity to culture.Lamin Sanneh advocates reconnecting religion and Christianity to culture, realizing that humanity without a sense of transcendence cannot really achieve a fulfillment that is anything but "murky self-centeredness."According to Sanneh, in light of the exigencies of postmodern times world Christianity would do well to embrace an alternative vision - one of global neighborliness - and then effectively model that vision as the new humanity for the twenty-first century and beyond.

Religion and the Variety of Culture: A Study in Origin and Practice (Christian Mission & Modern Culture)

Shanneh, Lamin

UNKNO

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Books by Sanneh, Lamin O.