For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about new insights in the study of African religious practices.
In the Yorubaland region of southwestern Nigeria, hundreds of thousands of Christian and Muslim pilgrims visit Ori-Oke — “prayer mountains” — for meditation, prayer and religious rituals. Although Ori-Oke sites often had previous roles in the practice of traditional local religions, the revival of their importance draws deeply on Christian traditions. The result is a vital form of African Christianity, typical of religious shifts happening around the continent. The groundbreaking anthropological study of Ori-Oke and its meanings, published in 2018, was conducted by researchers from the nearby University of Ilorin, Patrick Nwosu, Lemuel Odeh, Akiti Alamu, and A.Y. Mohammed. The study was part of a continent-wide project to generate new insights into the theology and anthropology of present-day African religious practices by providing resources to researchers working at dozens of African universities, including both flagship national universities and regional institutions. The two-year, $2-million-dollar grant was overseen by Calvin University’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity with funding from the John Templeton Foundation.
The grant grew out of a multiyear dialogue led by Nagel Institute director Joel Carpenter and program officers at the Foundation, who consulted with African academic and religious leaders to identify more than a dozen areas where African scholarship could help shape global conversations on the impact of religion on everyday life. The two-year project focused on just two of those topics: theological analyses of African Christian spirituality and values, and social scientific study of religious competition and innovation on the continent. Carpenter worked with key colleagues including lead project designer Mwenda Ntarangwi (a scholar of East African hip-hop who is currently CEO of Kenya’s Commission for Higher Education), Cape Town-based Cameroonian social anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh and Tite Tienou, a professor of theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, to identify potential researchers and publicize their request for proposals. “We reached out to just about every religious studies and sociology department on the continent, and the two competitions excited enormous interest,” Carpenter said. “We got more than 200 responses, and funded 23, all of which were productive — two years out from the project’s end, there have been well over a hundred publications.”