I have been observing and analyzing religious trends in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa for several decades, with a particular…
Traditional, African, religious, freedom?
Africa
Secularization and disenchantment
Over the past decade, scholarly inquiry into contemporary religion has moved from an understanding of religion as waning in the…
Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa
In his new publication, Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa, David Chidester explores South African indigenous religious heritage…
Colonialism’s religious domain
Recently I am struck by the ambiguity of the concept of the religious. Reading Linda Heuman’s review of Robert Bellah’s…
Freeing religion at the birth of South Sudan
If you had the opportunity to start from scratch, without the burden of a permanent constitution or an entrenched legal…
Religion and development in Africa
At African Arguments, Knox Chitiyo and Lucy Mbugua investigate the potential for faith-based groups to contribute to the achievement of…
New fellowship opportunities for African faculty
The Social Science Research Council has announced three new fellowship opportunities for African faculty researching topics related to peace, security, and development.…
Mamdani on the African uprisings
Mahmood Mamdami places the Egyptian revolution and other protest movements in the historical context of popular struggle in Africa.
From exodus to immigration
At Killing the Buddha: "Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists broke matzo with Jewish Israelis in a Tel Aviv basketball court before…
Farrakhan, Qaddafi, and the definition of American Islam
In another example of how mass media shape and constrain what constitutes legitimate Islam and religion more generally, the New…