Putting Satan at the Centre: Rethinking Contemporary Global Christianity in Nigeria and Beyond

Location
Danford Room 2nd floor Arts Building (R16 on the campus map)
Dates
Wednesday 12 December 2018 (16:30-18:30)
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Speaker: Laura Premack, Lancaster University

Part of the Africa Talks Seminar Series Autumn 2018.

Talks are held in the Danford Room, 2nd floor, Arts Building (R16 on the campus map). 
All welcome. 

  • Full seminar programme

Abstract

In this seminar I will share ideas from my book-in-progress, Blame Satan: Spiritual Warfare, National Identity, and the New Global Christianity, which examines Christianity in the world’s three most evangelical countries: Nigeria, Brazil, and the United States. My overarching argument is that Satan belongs at the centre of our understanding of contemporary global Christianity. This paper will focus on the Nigerian case, using a recent controversy over the “Aso Rock demons” as a lens to consider what I call (after Peter Geschiere) the modernity of demonology. (Aso Rock is the site of the Nigerian national government.) Using the scholarship of Geschiere, Birgit Meyer, Ruth Marshall and others as a point of departure, I show what is to be gained by bringing the insights of Africans and Africanists into the consideration of the global Pentecostal/charismatic movement as a whole.

Speaker biography

Laura Premack is Lecturer in Global Religion and Politics at Lancaster University, where she is also a Fellows of the Institute for Social Futures. She works on religion, politics and culture in Africa and the Americas, with a specific focus on the global Pentecostal movement in Nigeria and Brazil. Her doctorate is in global history and her research interests are fundamentally interdisciplinary, focusing as much on the present as the past. She is currently at work on a monograph,Blame Satan: Spiritual Warfare, National Identity and the New Global Christianity, and is developing collaborative projects on Race and Evangelicalism in the Americas as well as on the lived experience of hope.