Pope John Paul II made a historic apology to several groups oppressed by the church since its inquisition started. The late pontiff's apology to women as a group was as a result of the obnoxious and oppressive denial of women's human right by the Church and the greater society because of the wrong interpretation of the "submission" clause in the Bible. The subsequent re-interpretation of the submission clause in the Letter to the Ephesians strongly confirmed and affirmed the equality of man and woman and established the theological and philosophical basis for questioning oppressive cultural ethos in Africa and demanding for a theological paradigm shift which will help Africa to address the centuries old inequities, inequalities and injustices suffered and still borne by women in the 21 st century. This article captures the religious role and position of the church and defines the basis for calling for a new gender approach within the Church that will achieve gender equality in Africa.
This work aims at exploring the Igbo/African metaphysical sense of death and its traditional value and inter-communality. In this study, I intend to use the Igbo as a paradigm for an African experience of death. I begin by explaining that while thanatology is the systematic study of death, metaphysics is a study of reality as it concerns the phases of human existence from life to death. In doing so, I want to examine the African being in its wholeness. Interestingly, African philosophy conceives of being as dynamic and a force to be record. The African world itself is best described as one of becoming: it is a world where there are constant interactions between the dead and the living, between the spirit-land and the human world. Thus, existence-in-relation aptly depicts the African view of life and reality. For the Igbo, however, life and death are intimately connected. To the extent that the latter paves the way to the ancestral dwelling, it is an urgent longing to join his forebears. Ultimately, the Igbo/African attaches a great value to ancestral abode where death makes possible. Through initiation the Igbo anticipates death. Only then does death become a phenomenon of life, entering the Igbo ontological being. Thus death for the Igbo does not constitute an end. Rather it intimates an authentic being (another beginning), which expressly embodies eschatology. I argue that eschatology aims at overcoming time.
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