Being and Building up the Church in My Father’s Home

Book excerpt: The rehabilitation, by St. Pope Paul VI, of African traditional religions and cultures has made them more objective for philosophical, theological and anthropological investigation and reflection. And the investigating and reflecting subject is a native African himself. The repatriation of missiology into ecclesiology in the Catholic Church towards the end of the 20th Century was a new development; and the result of it is what we have before us in this book. Here personal native anthropological, philosophical and theological studies and experience have combined with in-depth reading of some African novelists’ necessarily Afrocentric distillation of African culture has nourished thinking and reflection at a new level in terms of ecclesial implications of living Christianity authentically and of being and building the Church in my father’s home beyond deference as defect.