The Renaissance of African Spiritualities vis-à-vis Christianity: Adopting the Model of Mutual Enrichment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Christianity has been dominant in many parts of Africa especially since its colonial contact. Recently, however, there is a surge of interest in reviving indigenous spiritualities among Africans, both in Africa and in the diaspora. In Lagos, Nigeria, for example, shrines compete with churches and mosques for adherents and positions. Among the Igbos, a form of convenient interreligiousness has been developed in the society. When issues of practical expediency arise, the Christian would have the option of referring back to his/her traditional religion. Beyond Africa, the rise of African spiritualities has become conspicuous. For various reasons, ranging from Afrocentrism to anti-religious tendencies to the popular religions, from racial animosity to politico-economic ideologies, a lot of people, Africans and non-Africans, are embracing the neo-African spiritualities. This article is a study addressing this revival, by critically analyzing the reasons for its re-emergence, the challenges that have accompanied the revival and the implications of it in the Christian–African spirituality relationship. Can this renaissance in African spirituality bring forth or support a renaissance in Africa? Africa has about 450 million Christians, about 40% of the continent’s population. People of African origin equally make up a good number of Christians outside Africa. In other words, Christianity is decisive, ideologically and structurally, not just as a religion but also in the socio-political life of Africans. Finding a way to harmonize Christianity and African spiritualities, especially in the face of this renaissance, for the growth of Africa, is the aim of this article. Hence, it suggests the model of “Mutual Enrichment.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".