A comprehensive resource on the nature and value of African religious life
Portrayals of African spirituality have been tainted in the past by harmful stereotypes and negative judgments or have altogether ignored African religions. Very few scholarly works have encompassed the depth of how spiritual care is conceptualized and practiced in African and African diasporic communities.
Spiritual Care in African Religious Cultures offers insights into the nature and value of African religious life while also giving persons of different religious persuasions information about African beliefs and practices. This book reveals how practitioners of African traditional religions and people who engage in African spirituality draw on their own spiritual traditions to help them live satisfying and productive lives. Lartey addresses key beliefs about the divine realm, ancestors, evil, health, death, and life, as well as practices such as ceremonies, manifestation of spirit, naming, and healing rites inherent in African and African Heritage religions, which are utilized in providing care for persons amid the challenges of living. He invites us to go beyond maligning and misrepresenting African religions and to enter into the therapeutic and life-giving realities of African life and thought.
Spiritual Care in African Religious Cultures is a comprehensive resource on African understandings of spiritual care and has the potential to enhance communal relationships for multicultural communities.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Kofi Asare Opoku
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Nature of African Religion
2 Ritual: Sacred Technology of African Religious Cultures
3 Manifestation of Spirit: Sacred Possession: Elevated States of Consciousness
4 Challenges to Life: Chaos, Evil, and Misfortune in African Religious Cultures
5 Divination and Divine Guidance
6 Health, Healing, and Wholeness
7 Death Is Like Birth: Death and Life in African Religious Cultures
8 Tsamō: African Spiritual Care
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Reviews
"A highly talented researcher and teacher, Emmanuel Lartey has written Spiritual Care in African Religious Cultures at a crucial time when national crises intersect to challenge the health and vibrancy of many communities. Lartey's African perspective holds insight for global concerns, showcasing the relevance of indigenous spirituality in the modern era. Offering ancient wisdom to contemporary questions regarding health, epistemology, and more, I highly recommend this book for both scholarly and general readers."—Jacob K. Olupona, professor, Harvard University
"Highlighting the vital role of spiritual care and community wellness, this book is essential for scholars and students seeking a nuanced understanding of African religion and its significance for Afro-diasporic communities today."—Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, associate professor of Africana studies and religious studies, Indiana University, Indianapolis
"With pastoral theology and therapeutic models firmly anchored in and conversant with Western epistemologies, the field of spiritual care has struggled to adequately account for cosmologies that understand care work as restoration of harmony across human, communal, ecological, ancestral, and divine realms. Emmanuel Lartey's Spiritual Care in African Religious Cultures reconceptualizes the very foundation of the field by locating its origins in classically African sources. Through the lens of African religious cultures, Lartey redefines spiritual care as a relational, ritual-centered way of life capable of aligning the visible and invisible realms and addressing imbalance at personal, social, and cosmic levels. In doing so, he widens the field beyond the mere conception of it as a helping profession and presents it as a lived spirituality that blends care of the soul into every facet of everyday life. Lartey invites readers to reimagine the fundamental premises of spiritual care and this illuminating resource has the potential to reshape how care is taught, practiced, and embodied."—Stephanie M. Sears, lecturer in spiritual care, Harvard Divinity School
About the Author
Emmanuel Y. Lartey is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Pastoral Theology and Spiritual Care at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University. He is the author of Pastoral Theology in an Intercultural World (2006) and Postcolonializing God: An African Practical Theology (2013); and was co-editor of Postcolonial Images of Spiritual Care (2020).
