Content area
Full Text
Gerrie ter Haar. How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. pp. ix + 120 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Cloth
Gerrie ter Haar's How God Became African: African Spirituality and Western Secular Thought provides new insight into the processes by which Africans refashioned Christianity to conform to Africa's unique spiritual needs while remaining faithful to the message of the Bible. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and neurological sciences, ter Haar highlights the complexity of the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical worlds to show how Africans' acceptance of the mutual interactions between these two worlds demonstrates not only the uniqueness of African spirituality, but also the universality of beliefs often associated with magic or miracle. While modernity has driven the West, for example, to frown upon public discourses about beliefs in miracles, such beliefs persist in the private realm, further demonstrating the resilience of such beliefs in spite of modernity. Moreover, new discoveries in neurological science appear to support the validity of miraculous healing. The resilience of Africans' beliefs in the cohabitation of the human and the spiritual worlds, die author maintains, does not imply the absence of modernity, but rather die appropriation of modern material discourse to explain the realities of the human universe in ways that reinforce Christian beliefs. After all, the beliefs in miraculous healing powers, the language of charismatic African evangelists,...