{"id":1608,"date":"2010-05-08T20:12:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-09T02:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1608"},"modified":"2010-05-08T20:12:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T02:12:00","slug":"an-african-investigates-her-own-traditional-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1608","title":{"rendered":"An African Investigates Her Own Traditional Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not that I have nothing to blog about, more that I have too much, and if I tried to write it all, nothing else will get done.<\/p>\n

All that aside, I suggest you pop over to Egregores<\/em> and read an interesting piece by a Christian urban West African (Ghananian) journalist who decides to investigate her own country’s traditional religion.<\/a><\/p>\n

Her attitudes and observations are, to me, an interesting mix of the culturally familiar and the unfamiliar.<\/p>\n

So when a new acquaintance invited me to the meeting of traditional believers this weekend, this is what went through my mind… I cannot say for sure that African traditional religion is evil. I cannot say for sure that it is good. I know that I have been preconditioned to consider it evil. I also know that I do not know. I would like to find out, but I\u2019m scared of the whole affair. My fear is an irrational fear. It is a fear of the unknown. I wanted to confront that fear. Because every time I confront my fears, I grow. Plus I was curious.
\nSo I went.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s part of a series of posts on African traditional religions in conflict with Christianity and Islam that you can find at the blog\u2014scroll to the bottom of the post for more links.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not that I have nothing to blog about, more that I have too much, and if I tried to write it all, nothing else will get done. All that aside, I suggest you pop over to Egregores and read an interesting piece by a Christian urban West African (Ghananian) journalist who decides to investigate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[121],"class_list":["post-1608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-africa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-pW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6406,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6406","url_meta":{"origin":1608,"position":0},"title":"Who Ruined Hoodoo?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013) 248 pp., photos, index, $85 (cloth), $28 (paper), ebook available. \u00a0 Hazzard-Donald teaches anthropology and sociology at Rutgers University-Camden. She is herself an initiate into the Orisha religion, but this is not a work\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Africa\"","block_context":{"text":"Africa","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=africa"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.press.uillinois.edu\/books\/images\/9780252078767.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6023,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6023","url_meta":{"origin":1608,"position":1},"title":"Why Pagans Did Not Fight for Their Gods","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Things Fall Apart, by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, published in 1958, is often labeled as the \"archetypal modern African novel.\" Set in the 1890s, at the beginning of British colonial rule, its protagonist is a hard-driving Igbo yam farmer, warrior, and village leader named Okonkwo, who holds himself, his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Africa\"","block_context":{"text":"Africa","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=africa"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/thumb\/6\/65\/ThingsFallApart.jpg\/201px-ThingsFallApart.jpg","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1093,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1093","url_meta":{"origin":1608,"position":2},"title":"Learning on the Ground","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"This is what online \"learning\" cannot do.A writer from the Guardian accompanies some British secondary students on a field trip to Glastonbury. (I happen to know the teacher.)The object, for Jamison, is not to deconstruct the stories and myths of Glastonbury. \"The point is for them to experience the story,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"education\"","block_context":{"text":"education","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=education"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6449,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6449","url_meta":{"origin":1608,"position":3},"title":"Investigating a “Grandmother Story”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 12, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Robert Mathiesen and Theitic, The Rede of the Wiccae: Adriana Porter, Gwen Thompson and the Birth of a Tradition of Witchcraft (Providence, R.I.: Olympic Press, 2005), 167 pp., $17.95 (paper). \u2022 \u2022 \u2022 Gwen Thompson (Craft name of Phyllis Healy), 1928\u20131986, founded the New England Coven of Traditional Witches in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"Book cover of Rede of the Wiccae","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/redeofthewiccae-e1399928966661.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8586,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8586","url_meta":{"origin":1608,"position":4},"title":"The BBC Interviews Iceland Heathens","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"You can download this episode (27 minutes) of the BBC's Heart and Soul program on the Heathens of Iceland: Floating in a hot spring, snow falling from the night sky, John Laurenson meets Teresa Drofn. A 25-year-old Heathen, Teresa describes her return to the religion of her Viking forebears as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Iceland\"","block_context":{"text":"Iceland","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=iceland"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Icelandic-blot.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6313,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6313","url_meta":{"origin":1608,"position":5},"title":"Ayahuasca Tourism and Pagan Holidays","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 7, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Kira Salak, a writer for National Geographic, has a good article published on her ayahuasca pilgrimage to Peru. But she can't call it a that. It was \"a lark,\" at least the first time: And then there is me, who a year ago came to Peru on a lark to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"entheogens\"","block_context":{"text":"entheogens","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=entheogens"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1609,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions\/1609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}