Stephanie Lämmert reports on the ‘Urban Spirituality’ seminar held on 8 June at St Antony’s College, Oxford
The historiography of the Zambian Copperbelt is very much influenced by the seminal literature produced by scholars of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute. To a large extent RLI scholarship of the 1940s and 1950s sought to paint a progressive image of an urban, secular and quickly industrializing society swiftly advancing towards modernity, a society which transcended narrow ‘tribal’ or religious identities on its road to a unifying national identity. As a consequence, knowledge production about the Copperbelt is characterized by a strong dichotomy between the rural and the urban, the secular and the religious. Similarly, many studies on spiritual expression and mission Christianity in Africa reinforce the rural-urban divide. In addition, these studies also obscure interdenominational fluidity by focusing on one particular mission society or church, thus overlooking the openness and inter-change of spiritual forms that characterizes Copperbelt spirituality until today. Read more >>