Christianity and Public Culture in Africa

Christianity and Public Culture in Africatakes the reader beyond Africars"s apparent exceptionalism. African Christians have created new publics, often in ways that offer fresh insights into the symbolic and practical boundaries separating the secular and the sacred, the private and the public, and the liberal and the illiberal. Critical reason and Christian convictions have combined in surprising ways when African Christians have engaged with vital public issues such as national constitutions and gender relations, and with literary imaginings and controversies over tradition and HIV/AIDS. The contributors demonstrate how the public significance of Christianity varies across time and place. They explore rural Africa and the continentrs"s major cities, and colonial and missionary situations, as well as mass-mediated ideas and images in the twenty-first century. They also reveal the plurality of Pentecostalism in Africa and keep in view the continentrs"s continuing denominational diversity. Students and scholars will find these topical studies to be impressive in scope.

Harri Englund is a reader in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book about Africa is Human Right and African Airwaves Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio.