The Public Face Of African New Religious Movements In Diaspora

The growing pace of international migration, technological revolution in media and travel generate circumstances that provide opportunities for the mobility of African new religious movements (ANRMs) within Africa and beyond. ANRMs are furthering their self-assertion and self-insertion into the religious landscapes of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Their growing presence and public visibility seem to be more robustly captured by the popular media than by scholars of NRMs, historians of religion and social scientists, a tendency that has probably shaped the public mental picture and understanding of the phenomena. This book provides new theoretical and methodological insights for understanding and interpreting ANRMs and African-derived religions in diaspora. Contributors focus on individual groups and movements drawn from Christian, Islamic, Jewish and African-derived religious movements and explore their provenance and patterns of emergence; their belief systems and ritual practices; their public/civic roles; group self-definition; public perceptions and responses; tendencies towards integration/segregation; organisational networks; gender orientations and the implications of interactions within and between the groups and with the host societies. The book includes contributions from scholars and religious practitioners, thus offering new insights into how ANRMs can be better defined, approached, and interpreted by scholars, policy makers, and media practitioners alike.

The growing pace of international migration, technological revolution in media and travel generate circumstances that provide opportunities for the mobility of African new religious movements (ANRMs) within Africa and beyond. ANRMs are furthering their self-assertion and self-insertion into the religious landscapes of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Their growing presence and public visibility seem to be more robustly captured by the popular media than by scholars of NRMs, historians of religion and social scientists, a tendency that has probably shaped the public mental picture and understanding of the phenomena. This book provides new theoretical and methodological insights for understanding and interpreting ANRMs and African-derived religions in diaspora. Contributors focus on individual groups and movements drawn from Christian, Islamic, Jewish and African-derived religious movements and explore their provenance and patterns of emergence; their belief systems and ritual practices; their public/civic roles; group self-definition; public perceptions and responses; tendencies towards integration/segregation; organisational networks; gender orientations and the implications of interactions within and between the groups and with the host societies. The book includes contributions from scholars and religious practitioners, thus offering new insights into how ANRMs can be better defined, approached, and interpreted by scholars, policy makers, and media practitioners alike.

This book provides new theoretical and methodological insights for understanding and interpreting ANRMs and African-derived religions in diaspora. Contributors focus on groups and movements drawn from Christian, Islamic, Jewish and African-derived religious movements and explore their provenance and patterns of emergence, their belief systems and ritual practices. The book offers new insights into how ANRMs can be better defined, approached, and interpreted by scholars, policy makers and media practitioners alike.

The essays in this volume illustrates the variety and power of predominantly pentecostal-charismatic movements between Western and African religious actors and groups that has developed across the past twenty years. In so doing, it also highlights the dramatic change in global "migration" patterns as a result of relatively inexpensive air travel.

Informative guide offering interpretation and analysis of African immigrant Christianities in Western societies and their impact on the wider local-global religious scene.

Although humans have always migrated, the present phenomenon of mass migration is unprecedented in scale and global in reach. Understanding migration and migrants has become increasingly relevant for world Christianity. This volume identifies and addresses several key topics in the discourse of world Christianity and migration. Senior and emerging scholars and researchers of migration from all regions of the world contribute chapters on central issues, including the feminization of international migration, the theology of migration, south-south migration networks, the connection between world Christianity, migration, and civic responsibility, and the complicated relationship between migration, identity and citizenship. It seeks to give voice particularly to migrant narratives as important sources for public reasoning and theology in the 21st century.

New Religious Movements tend to start their lives with a number of unequivocal statements, not only of a theological nature but also about the world and appropriate behaviours for the believer. Yet these apparently inalienable Truths and their interpretations frequently become revised, ‘adjusted’ or selectively adopted by different believers. This book explores different ways in which, as NRMs develop, stagnate, fade away, or abruptly cease to exist, certain orthodoxies and practices have, for one reason or another, been dropped or radically altered. Sometimes such changes are adapted by only a section of the movement, resulting in schism. Of particular concern are processes that might lead to violent and/or anti-social behaviour. As part of the Ashgate/Inform series, and in the spirit of the Inform Seminars, this book approaches its topic from a wide range of perspectives. Contributors include academics, current and former members of NRMs, and members of ‘cult-watching’ movements. All the contributions are of a scholarly rather than a polemic nature, and brought together by Eileen Barker, the founder of Inform.

The modern world is full of diasporas. African Americans, and Muslims and Hindus in Europe, are some of the best known among them. The concept of 'diaspora' has spread rapidly in academic writing and the popular press. But what is a diaspora ? Derived from Jewish tradition, the word is now often applied to any minority which has migrated from its place of origin. Increasingly, the criterion used by journalists and academics for identifying such minorities is ethnic identity rather than religious allegiance. The present volume explores the ways in which the term 'diaspora' has been applied in past and present to various religious communities in different contexts. It considers under what circumstances people may be classified as living in a diaspora, and the consequences this has for their position in society. Specific chapters study Africans in modern Europe, Jews in ancient Egypt, Syrians throughout the Roman empire, Hindus in Britain and Muslims in the Netherlands today, and other so-called diaspora communities.