Böcker av Benson Ohihon Igboin

How might we understand religion, particularly Christianity, in a country that exudes real paradoxes in politics, culture and development? Religion is an ambivalent phenomenon. It can either be used to wage war or peace; engender love or hatred, build a society or destroy it, fight against corruption or enable it, and so forth. In Nigeria, religion has become a powerful and obsessive instrument to mediate or construct anything. Religion is used to create, secure, maintain, defend one¿s space and attack another¿s. This volume, in honour of an erudite New Testament scholar, Professor Olu E. Alana, is an assemblage of essays that critically examine how religion has been utilised to nuance philosophical, political, indigenous, social, theological, sexual, health and educational issues that border on Nigeriäs development.

Think religion, think Nigeria! the saying goes. Although the description that Africans are notoriously and incurably religious has been caustically criticised and contested, it appears that it is more or less a theoretical or intellectual exercise than practical reality. One may still be persuaded to argue that Nigeria is still as furiously religious in the twenty-first century as it was before the advent of missionary religions and colonialism. Although philosophy is often conceived as a tool of analysis of religious truth claims and of religious phenomena, the strong resonance of religion in everyday life and encounter has made analytic philosophy to tread with caution in Nigeria. In fact, many of the philosophers are as furiously religious outside the classroom as other people they unsympathetically criticise. However, the need for philosophy is urgent, to at least, clarify and analyse the texture of religious claim that seems to not help the country so much.

The coronavirus pandemic ruptured the ways things were done before it. Christian liturgy creatively migrated from the physical to the internet, the orbital wherein it sometime operated. This volume, while taking the issue of e-worship and e-mission of the Pentecostal churches seriously during the lockdown, it grounds them on empirical methods. It studies how Nigerian Pentecostal ecclesial processes were altered during the lockdown, and revisioning them in the context of the new normal. The resort to family/home fellowship as the basic unit of the church and society raises critical theological issues for a contextual Christianity. In addition, how does the Bible speak to a Christian in a new normal; does the faith of a Christian plot a graph from pre-COVID-19 through COVID-19 and perhaps beyond? As a church in the gap, how did Pentecostal Christianity in Nigeria raise theological, philosophical, social, ethical, and political questions that will for long agitate the mind when looking back to the year 2020? Why the dissonance in the health and wealth theology of Nigerian Pentecostalism ¿ a rupture that separates wealth from health ¿ even if momentarily? What are the implications of such a split, given the historical trajectory and (social) media sensitisation/sentimentalisation that was accorded to this particular teaching? What are the Pentecostal theatrics that characterised the lockdown? What are the theological implications of carving identity and class during the pandemic when it is unambiguous that the disease does not recognise such distinctions? These and other teething questions are pungently addressed in this volume.