Abstract African Indigenous religions have undergone massive changes in their encounters with modernity, and studies of conversion to the Abrahamic religions abound, often addressing the religious changeover itself. Based on long-term fieldwork of the Kapsiki/Higi of North Cameroon and northeastern Nigeria, this article instead focuses on the internal processes which cause the waning of such a religion. Acknowledging the notion that these religions ‘dwell’ in the historical environment, plus the primacy of ritual in them, this essay follows a series of rituals as they respond to new challenges, and monitors the way they adapt through a mechanism dubbed ‘cultural drift’. The factors highlighted are 1. The world that gave rise to Indigenous religions longer exists and its particular challenges have disappeared, and cultural drift morphs into a mechanism for decline; 2. Such local religions are inherently vulnerable, and the article analyzes the internal dynamics leading to such vulnerability.
Abstract This paper offers a critical, interdisciplinary examination of artificial intelligence ( AI ) as a theological mediator, arguing that AI systems do not merely transmit religious knowledge but actively reproduce gendered epistemic hierarchies embedded in their training data. Grounded in an African Technocultural Feminist framework and informed by feminist hermeneutics and critical AI studies, the study employs a qualitative, discourse-analytical method based on simulated interviews with major large language models. These prompts focus on women’s roles in church leadership, religious life in the Global South, and interpretations of Proverbs 31 and Ephesians 5:22–24, serving as test cases for identifying recurring algorithmic biases. The findings reveal a pattern described as “soft-neutral patriarchy,” where AI systems present balanced perspectives while subtly privileging dominant, often complementarian interpretations. Women are consistently represented in relation to domesticity, moral responsibility, and relational spirituality, while leadership roles are framed as conditional or exceptional. In interpretations of Proverbs 31, women’s agency is acknowledged but confined within domesticated and productivity-centered ideals. Similarly, readings of Ephesians 5:22–24 tend to soften hierarchical submission rhetorically while maintaining its structural logic, a tendency identified as “algorithmic equilibrium bias.” The study also shows how AI systems essentialize the Global South as inherently traditional, reinforcing colonial epistemic hierarchies and obscuring the diversity of African women’s lived experiences. Beyond biblical texts, the paper demonstrates how AI reproduces longstanding patriarchal distortions in representations of figures such as Mary Magdalene and Lilith, privileging sexualized or demonized portrayals over feminist reinterpretations. These dynamics are conceptualized as forms of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical erasure, and epistemic fragmentation, resulting in “algorithmic orthodoxy.” The paper concludes by advocating a decolonial reconfiguration of AI grounded in epistemic justice, indigenous knowledge systems, and participatory feminist design, positioning AI as a potential tool for theological liberation and gender justice in the Global South.
Abstract This introduction to the special issue advances a double understanding of the dynamic in African and diasporic religious life: religion as energetic flow coursing through bodies, materials, and atmospheres, and religion as continuous adaptation through negotiation and change. Drawing on the concept of lived religion, the essays gathered here examine how communities in Tanzania, Bénin, South Africa, Portugal, and the United States sustain, craft, and reimagine religious worlds through coordinated social labor. From Vodún conjure to Islamic radio broadcasting to an Afro-Jewish Passover Seder, contributors reveal how pluralisms emerge from below rather than from clerical or state-driven consensus. The introduction argues that translation – understood not metaphorically but as social infrastructure – underlies these dynamics: it is the medium through which energies circulate, change accrues, and vernacular ecumenisms become livable. Together, the essays respecify lived religion in Africa and the diaspora as perpetually animated and remade through creativity, friction, and linguistic labor.
Abstract Following medical complications in traditional male circumcision in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, the government intervened to regulate the rite. At the same time, women were beginning to involve themselves in conversations about circumcision, while young men dominated daily life in circumcision schools. This provoked a backlash from traditional leaders who viewed such interventions as desacralizing circumcision. They claimed circumcision was part of Xhosa religion, and they were its only legitimate custodians. This paper argues that these interventions demonstrate that the practice of circumcision is a dynamic expression of lived religion that is subject to struggle, negotiation, and contradiction. Traditional leaders’ insistence on the more orthodox religious foundation of circumcision was a conservative reaction that obscured and smoothed over these contradictions.
Abstract This afterword considers the usefulness of vibrancy versus vitality to describe how religious practitioners dynamically express and live out their faith in everyday life despite contradictions to religious orthodoxy.
