Browsing by Author "Bongmba, Elias K"

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    Christian Churches and the Cape Town Water Crisis
    (2022-12-01) Johnson, Bradley Michael; Bongmba, Elias K
    Between 2015 and 2018, Cape Town, South Africa experienced a drought that decimated its water supply. In order to reduce water consumption, the city government announced the coming of a “Day Zero,” when it would be forced to shut off the taps and water would no longer be available through municipal lines. Residents had to change their everyday practices with water, both to save the limited supply left and to avoid rising water tariffs imposed by the city. This project is the result of fieldwork conducted during late 2018, following the apex of the water crisis, to investigate how several Christian communities responded to the water crisis. In a series of interviews with members and leaders of an evangelical church, an Anglican church, and a Pentecostal-Charismatic church, I sought to understand how my interlocutors adjusted their practical relationship with water in light of the shortage, and how their theologies were being changed. In response to the acute environmental disaster of the drought and the looming specter of climate change, we discussed the causes of Cape Town’s crisis, the government’s action, the best solutions, how their churches reacted, and what responsibilities Christians have for the care of the Earth. Using literature in eco-theology and theological ethics, I demonstrate how their responses reflect both the tumultuous socio-political context of post-apartheid South Africa, as well as the religious foundations and resources of their respective traditions. In the end, I argue that churches like theirs must develop more robust eco-theologies that think deeply about creation and the climate crisis, and that they must mobilize these concerns for the Earth into public spheres where necessary work can be done.
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    Quilting Faith: African American Quilts as Source Material for Study of African American Religion
    (2015-10-20) Matthews, Aundrea L; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K; Baber, Graham
    Scholars of African American religion have done well to note the poignant role of cultural productions in the making, doing, and theorizing of religion and life options. Lacking in this discourse is critical attention to the religious significance of African American quilts, the quilters who make them, and the quilt-making process as source material for the study of African American religion. This dissertation adopts and thinks with the work of Anthony B. Pinn’s definition of African American religion as the quest for complex subjectivity, a desire or feeling for life meaning. Through a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on religious studies, sociology and art criticism/art history, the dissertation asserts that some African American quilters use scraps of mundane materials to craft visual testimonies that link the quest for complexity to everyday life. Research from the analyses allows scholars to gain deeper insight into the role of African American quilts in the expression of religion, and consider the cultural production of quilts as legitimate and viable source material for the study of African American religious life. Quilting Faith: African American Quilts as Source Material for the Study of African American Religion reveals that African American quilts are just as important to understanding African American religion as music, drama, dance, poetry, and slave narratives.
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    The Ethics of Whiteness: Race, Religion, and Social Transformation in South Africa
    (2017-04-21) Schneider, Rachel Christianna; Bongmba, Elias K; Faubion, James D
    The Ethics of Whiteness is an ethnographic study of progressive white Christians living in Johannesburg who sought to engage with histories of racism, contemporary racial inequality, and calls for racial redress. After apartheid, many whites attempted to preserve their privileged way of life through strategies of withdrawal, isolation, and emigration. In this context, Christian churches became key sites for maintaining elite white cultural norms. The individuals and groups I studied chose an alternate path: one which sought to embrace, rather than resist, sociopolitical and racial change. My interlocutors intentionally lived and worked in poor, black spaces and were involved in experimental social and spiritual communities aimed at bridging race and class divides. Seeking to challenge dominant white norms, they strove to cultivate lives of simplicity, service, and “downward mobility.” Such actions, while not unproblematic, were legitimated through a plurality of secular and religious ideals that framed authentic South Africanness, authentic humanness, and authentic Christianity as bound up with lived sacrifice and struggle. At the heart of this study is what I call the ethics of whiteness—the beliefs, practices, and values that motivated those I studied to engage in efforts to think and act otherwise in relation to their conservative white peers. I develop the concept of the ethics of whiteness in dialogue with concerns and methodological approaches found in the anthropology of ethic, which focuses on the empirical and qualitative study of ethical life. While wary of traditional religious institutions, my interlocutors drew from a number of religious sources and histories to develop their socially engaged form of Christian spirituality, including 1) Black Theology and South Africa’s history of multiracial religious activism against apartheid; 2) liberal Protestantism and its focus on social development and civic engagement; and 3) the Emerging Church Movement, an Anglo-American reform movement that begin in the late 1990s in opposition to conservative white evangelicalism. The confluence of these movements, I suggest, ultimately allowed my interlocutors to understand themselves simultaneously as political activists, development workers, and Christian revolutionaries engaged in the work of building a “new” non-racial, democratic South Africa where white and black alike could find a dwelling place.