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Olupona, Jacob K., ed. AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY: FORMS, MEANINGS, AND EXPRESSIONS. World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, volume 3. New York: Herder and Herder, Crossroad Publishing Company. 2000. xxxvi + 476 pp. $35.00.
This book consists of twenty articles, eleven of which relate to African traditional religions, six to Islam and Christianity, and the remainder to African religious movements of the Diaspora. Most of the contributions on African traditional religion are written from a classical anthropological perspective and present a description of the cosmology of one or another ethnic group in Africa. This perspective may form the reason why two major questions regularly arose when I read this part of the book: "When?" and "Who?"
Little attention is paid to religious change. Religion is interpreted as a given, and the issue of religious history is by and large ignored. It remains unclear when the described beliefs were held by Africans and whether these beliefs are still important. In David Westerlund's article on spirituality and disease, at least reference is made to this problem: "Needless to say, this does not mean that important religious and other changes have...