Bøker av David Chidester

Examines the emergence of the concepts of "religion"and "religions" on colonial frontiers. The book offers an analysis of the ways in which European travellers, missionaries, settlers, and government agents, as well as indigenous Africans, engaged in the comparison of alternative religious ways of life as one dimension of intercultural contact.

This guide offers detailed reviews of over 600 works that have established the importance of Christianity in South African history, society, and religious experience. It should be of interest to scholars and students of religious studies, cultural anthropology, African Studies and history.

This is a guide to three global religions that have established strong local communities in South Africa. The guide begins with a general introduction to the immigrant origins, minority status and global connections of each tradition.

Provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project.

Wild Religion is a wild ride through recent South African history from the advent of democracy in 1994 to the euphoria of the football World Cup in 2010. In the context of South Africa's political journey and religious diversity, David Chidester explores African indigenous religious heritage with a difference. As the spiritual dimension of an African Renaissance, indigenous religion has been recovered in South Africa as a national resource. Wild Religion analyzes indigenous rituals of purification on Robben Island, rituals of healing and reconciliation at the new national shrine, Freedom Park, and rituals of animal sacrifice at the World Cup. Not always in the national interest, indigenous religion also appears in the wild religious creativity of prison gangs, the global spirituality of neo-shamans, the ceremonial display of Zulu virgins, the ancient Egyptian theosophy in South Africa's Parliament, and the new traditionalism of South Africa's President Jacob Zuma. Arguing that the sacred is produced through the religious work of intensive interpretation, formal ritualization, and intense contestation, Chidester develops innovative insights for understanding the meaning and power of religion in a changing society. For anyone interested in religion, Wild Religion uncovers surprising dynamics of sacred space, violence, fundamentalism, heritage, media, sex, sovereignty, and the political economy of the sacred.

Explores the religious dimensions of American popular culture in places such as: baseball, the Human Genome Project, Coca-Cola, rock 'n' roll, the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, the charisma of Jim Jones, Tupperware, and the free market.

A monumental new history of Christianity from its beginnings as a persecuted cult, up to its present day international diversity. 'A model of condensation without simplification' - J.M Coetzee 'Clear and balanced. A triumph of compression... invaluable as a work of reference for students' - Karen Armstrong, Times 'A new and ambitious concept in presenting Christian history...a triumph. Never before, I suspect, has this cavalcade of thinkers been presented in a manner which so successfully combines depth, breadth, and succinctness' - Gerard Noel, Catholic Herald