Culture and Commitment
Congregational Life and Christian Womanhood: Gender, Identity, and Belonging in 1950s-1960s East Africa
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Beth Ann Williams
Christianity was introduced to East Africa by foreign missionaries associated with colonial power structures, but by the middle of the twentieth century it had become a central feature of intellectual life for many communities. Scholars of religion and society in Africa have demonstrated the ways that Western patriarchal norms and expectations placed boundaries and domestic expectations on African Christian women. Fewer have considered how Christian women mobilized religious ideas and structures for their own purposes. Drawing on church archival materials and interviews with over one hundred Kenyan and Tanzanian women, I argue that religion was central to developing ideals of womanhood and the actual lives of Christian women in mid-twentieth century East Africa. Christian communities were spaces of discipline, in which particular understandings of womanhood were developed and communicated. But they were also living communities that women actively shaped. This paper addresses both sides of religious life, demonstrating the boundaries and possibilities Christian identity contributed to East African society.
Religious Commitment and Marital Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Forgiveness
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Megha Deuskar, Angeline Thomas
Relationships are a crucial part of human lives. Among the many relationships that have a huge impact on life, the marital relationship stands out as a very important one. Satisfaction in married life has been shown to be conducive for the health and flourishing of the partners. Driver & Gottman (2004) suggest the necessity for exploring positive qualities required for the thriving of an individual or relationship. Whether religiosity contributes to satisfaction in marital relationships has been a scantily researched topic, especially in India. Since most religions promote forgiveness in interpersonal relationships, it is likely that forgiveness is the pathway through which religiosity contributes to marital satisfaction. In this study, an attempt will be made to investigate the relationship between religious commitment and marital satisfaction and to further find out whether this relationship is mediated by forgiveness. Data will be collected from a sample of approximately 100 married Indian individuals. The tools used will be the Religious Commitment Inventory (Worthington et al, 2012), Heartland Forgiveness Scale (Thompson et al, 2005) and Couple Satisfaction Index (Funk & Rogge, 2007). Data will be pooled into SPSS and appropriate analyses will be run to see the relationship between the variables.
Global Ethics for the Faithful
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas D. Lynch, Cynthia Lynch
Our paper addresses global ethics for the faithful and argues for a practical effort for religious institutions to help improve world ethics. For the past few decades, the Parliament of World Religions has addressed the topic of global ethics. It has concluded that religious global ethics is impossible with the exception of one built upon the Golden Rule as it is the only common fundamental value among the world’s religions. As developed by such great philosophers such as Bertram Russell, moral relativism is a key concern in our paper. Briefly stated, it maintains that for rational thinkers, ethics is merely emotive and essentially nonsense. Fortunately for us, his colleague—Ludwig Wittgenstein—said that rational ethical argument was possible among people who shared a common fundamental value or values. In a 2019 book, we noted that ethics needs to be understood in the context of human consciousness. People, who have an egocentric consciousness, think ethically in terms of their pleasure or pain. Not surprisingly, many common ethical problems are closely associated with egocentric thinkers and less associated with altruistic thinkers. For our purposes, the fact that people can morally develop through training and education is important. If world religions took on the task of teaching the Golden Rule, with all of its moral implications, the ethical impact on the world would be remarkable. Ideally, that education would be a common curriculum centered on consciousness and addressed to the children in the world’s temples, synagogues, mosques, and churches.
An Evaluation of the Value of Immortality in Igbo Culture and Christianity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ogochukwu Roseline Ifeka
The Igbo of Nigeria has a lot of commonality between its culture and the tenets of Christianity especially when it comes to life after death. Though Igbo Christians believe that Christianity only helped to advance most of the practices of the Igbo nation, traditional Igbo that are not Christians believe strongly that their teachings and practices are one and the same with beliefs and practices of Christians especially when it comes to the immortality of the human soul or life after death. For them, the difference is only based on semantics. While Igbo culture as regards after life talks of Uwa Ndi Ichie (world of those who lived and died meritoriously according to their tradition) and Uwa Ndi Akamogoli (those who lived a wasted life according to tradition), Christianity on the other hands talks of heaven and hell. The problem this paper addresses is whether Christianity advanced the Igbo understanding of life after death or are they the same in both traditions. This work therefore aims at exposing the understanding of immortality of the soul in Igbo culture as well as in Christianity, and to establish a common ground between the two. To achieve this, the study adopts historical and sociological methods of the interpretation of the primary and secondary data collected. Significantly, this work will be of immense benefit to the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria as well as to Christians in Igbo land in particular, and in Nigeria as a whole.
