2022 Folorunso Alakija Distinguished Lecture on Religion in Africa

1280 Massachusetts Ave., 3rd Floor,Cambridge MA 02138

20 October, 2022

Description

Join us for the 2022 Folorunso Alakija Distinguished Lecture on Religion and Public Life in Africa on Thursday, October 20 at 5pm in the CAS Lounge. In the last few decades, religion has taken a central place in Africa and African diaspora affairs and indeed that of the Global South more broadly. Social, economic, and political discourses have been increasingly shaped by religious sensibilities and religious activities. Now in its fourth year, the distinguished lecture was established by Mrs. Folorunso Alakija to provide a platform for the Harvard University Center for African Studies to connect faith leaders with the Harvard community and beyond in a conversation about the constantly shifting and contested boundary between the secular and the sacred, the public and the private. This year's lecture, entitled We Were Wrong: Contemporary Pentecostalism, Media, and the Challenges of the Health-and-Wealth Gospel, will be delivered by Professor J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu PhD, DD (HC), FGA. , Baëta-Grau Professor of Contemporary African Christianity and Pentecostalism , Trinity Theological Seminary, Legon, Ghana. In this lecture we examine the fallout of the health-and-wealth gospel that has characterized certain streams of African Christianity since the early 1980s. Originally associated with American televangelism, this teaching has been popularized through the innovative use of media technologies since the 1990s. “We Were Wrong”, the main title of the lecture is a pluralized rendition of a voluminous and sobering “confession” of Jim Bakker, the North American prosperity preacher who in 1989 was sentenced to prison for fraud. His trial was linked to his prosperity preaching, which he also embodied in a lifestyle of ostentatious living and conspicuous consumerist values. Those values have proven popular not just in North America, but also, in African contemporary Pentecostal Christianity. Jim Bakker used his prison experience to correct the religious excesses that he touted as biblical and recanted them in another publication titled, Prosperity and the Coming Apocalypse. Following Jim Bakker, other “apostles” of prosperity including Benny Hinn have recently made various U-turns on their teachings. These North American developments have ripple effects on the African religious terrain. Most importantly for our purposes, some of the very unfortunate life experiences that prosperity preachers claim cannot befall people of faith, especially, tithers, have sadly happened to some of its proponents, including several in Africa. All these occurrences have attracted media attention. We examine here some of the tensions that occur between faith and misfortune using contemporary Pentecostal Christianity in Africa and their prosperity teachings as backdrop so illustrate some the fascinating phenomena that have occurred in religion in Africa in the media age. Speaker Bio: J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu PhD (Birmingham, UK), Baëta-Grau Professor of Contemporary African Christianity and Pentecostal/Charismatic Theology and President of the Trinity Theological Seminary, Accra, Ghana. He has served as visiting scholar to Harvard University; Luther Seminary, Minnesota; Overseas Ministries Study Center, Princeton Theological Seminary; Asbury Theological Seminary, Kentucky, USA (2015); and Yonsei International University in Songdo, South Korea (2016). Prof. Asamoah-Gyadu is author of many publications including African Charismatics (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2005); Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2013); Sighs and Signs of the Spirit (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2015); and co-editor with Frieder Ludwig of African Christian Presence in the West (Trenton, NJ: AWP, 2011). He is lead editor of Between Babel and Pentecost: Migrant Readings from Africa, Europe, and Asia (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), and has articles in other international journals on World Christianity. Prof. Asamoah-Gyadu is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.