Culture, Spirituality and Economic Development: Opening a dialogue

"Points out the necessity of changing [cultural] narratives if real values-transformation is to take place. This is an important work." --Peter Riddell, London Bible College

"This book provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area of information technology as it relates to sustainable economic development and the development of knowledge societies"--Provided by publisher.

This collection explores the complex links between social and economic development and religious and spiritual belief. Writers explore the scope for promoting women's rights and needs offered by religious belief and practice and analyse feminist responses to fundamentalist regimes which use religious doctrine to justify women's oppression.

ÿ ?[It] reflects original research and contributes to new developments in the field of theology and religion with regard to its developmental role within a transformation context. The book may easily stand out in future as seminal in the way that it promoted the social development debate of the church and its organisational structures from an interdisciplinary focus.? ? Prof Antoinette Lombard Department of Social Work and Criminology University of Pretoria

The study of Christianity in the non-Western world reveals a demographic shift in the center of Christianity from the Northern Hemisphere to the South. But the contradictory aspect of the massive African conversion to Christian faith is the grinding poverty level in Africa. This condition raises important theological and ecclesiological questions that demand urgent answers. Therefore, the research objectives of this book are to examine African Catholicism's involvement in human promotion and to seek a new way of theologizing Christianity that moves sub-Saharan African peoples to action against the massive injustices that keep them poor. Drawing on Africae Munus, the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of the Second African Synod (2011), and Bernard Lonergan's notion of culture, African Catholicism and Hermeneutics of Culture argues that to truly be "the spiritual 'lung' of humanity," African Catholicism must appropriate the Christian message to transform African attitudes and personhood and so foster a self-reliant commitment to integral African development.