Ritual is one of the ways in which a group of people or a believing community expresses in concrete terms their faith in a deity(ies). Two of the many functions of rituals are to secure blessings from the deity or to ward off evil. This article studies four Krobo rituals to explore the ultimate meaning of life in Krobo worldview: material and spiritual wellbeing. The fight against sickness, misfortune, evil and other disasters provides the framework within which they express their dependence on their creator by means of rituals. To the Krobo life without the divinity cannot attain its fullness; hence the constant appeal to the divinities for protection and blessings. 1 Interest in this topic began in the years 2001-2002, when I was a postgraduate student in Missiology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Field work and collection of data, however, took place between June 2003 and August 2004 at Agomanya, when I was appointed lecturer in the Department for the Study of Religions at the University of Ghana, Legon. 2 According to Huber (1966:140; 1980:246), the Krobo are one of the seven Adangme tribes in the southern basin of the Volta in Ghana. 3 This is in line with what Sarpong states about African religions in general: The African has a pragmatic and utilitarian outlook on religion: religion must prevent man from being harmed; religion must make man happy; religion must neutralize the evil forces, both physical and psychical that surround man or else it loses its meaning (Sarpong 1975:42).
Editorial Note
Symbols are communicative tools with performative functions in all cultures. Apart from their decorative functions, non-Christian symbols adopted into Christianity have had a tremendous impact on Christian life since the early times, especially in liturgical practices. Through Western missionary activities, Ghana inherited Christian biblical-liturgical art as has been developed in the home countries of the missionaries. However, since the 1960s Adinkra symbols have been incorporated into Christian worship and theology, receiving attention within secular and religious circles because of their communicative potential. On the religious level, some churches have adopted them as logos or incorporated them into architectural designs and liturgical art. This paper seeks to investigate what motivates various missions to choose particular Adinkra symbol(s) and what they hope to achieve with them. Furthermore, it attempts a theological reflection on the communicative potential of artefacts in Ghanaian Christianity as a response to the "Great Commission. "We approach the subject from a historical, contextual, and theological perspective, using selected Roman Catholic and Methodist churches in Ghana as case studies. The study employed unstructured in-depth interviews and photo elicitations to trace the relationship between visual arts and religion, with particular emphasis on Christian visual arts and how they have informed Christianity in Ghana.Apart from their decorative functions, "symbols," both secular and religious, generally are effective tools of communication which often speak louder than words. This has been the case for non-Christian symbols adopted into Ghanaian
Paul’s response to the issue of sexual immorality in the Corinthian community has attracted the attention of several biblical scholars. While some think that the judgment of Paul on the incestuous man in 1 Corinthians 5:1-13 concerns the identity of the Christian community and moral responsibility, others argue that the focus is on the church’s response to immorality. The present study, on the other hand, through a literary critical analysis of the text, with close attention to its semantics and allusions, and an assessment of the material in the light of its social and historical background, establishes that the absence of a ‘functional leadership’ in the Corinthian Church in the absence of its founder, Paul, to provide an authoritative guide to members exacerbated their moral decadence. The paper concludes that contemporary Ghanaian church polity can learn participatory and shared leadership, which will foster group cohesion, promote the unity of purpose, and heal discord within Church communities.
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