The Immersion of Catholic Christianity in Kalunga
This piece reflects on the engagement of African-descended people with Catholicism since the fifteenth century in West-Central Africa and the Atlantic diaspora. Rather than look at the process within a Christianity-centered model, I reorient this history within an interpretive framework that I call...
| Published in: | Journal of Africana religions |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
The Pennsylvania State University Press
2014
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| In: |
Journal of Africana religions
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| Further subjects: | B
kalunga
B South Carolina Lowcountry B Catholicism B Virgin Mary B Congo |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This piece reflects on the engagement of African-descended people with Catholicism since the fifteenth century in West-Central Africa and the Atlantic diaspora. Rather than look at the process within a Christianity-centered model, I reorient this history within an interpretive framework that I call “kalunga.” The Kongo word kalunga evokes ideas about place and spiritual knowledge that I employ as a label for the all-encompassing physical and conceptual world inhabited by African-descended people. In this framework, I contend that the Catholic Christianity taken to West-Central Africa was subsumed within kalunga and thus transformed from a separate religion into a fundamental component of kalunga. Captive West-Central Africans then extended this relationship between Catholic Christianity and kalunga into the Atlantic diaspora, where it shaped the development of religious cultures in the Americas, including in those societies where colonizers and enslavers installed Protestant Christianity as the dominant institutional religion. |
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| ISSN: | 2165-5413 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of Africana religions
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