Yale Divinity School scholars have created the Project on Religious Freedom & Society in Africa, part of the school’s World Christianity Initiative (WCI)—an interdisciplinary study of the impact of religion on democratization and social empowerment. It holds “obedience to God an obligation simultaneous with loyalty to the nation.”
“Religion has a big role to play at the level of civil society,” says Lamin Sanneh, director of the project. “Economic and political pressures have fueled an upsurge of religious interest, creating new fault lines, along with new opportunities for research and outreach. Amid current economic challenges and rising expectations driven by demographic and labor shifts, religious resurgence is evidence of the search for new meaning and forms of community across the world.”
“Economic and political pressures have fueled an upsurge of religious interest.”
The project will conduct fieldwork into three areas: research on how contemporary religious issues impact society and democratic politics; regional workshops to promote the obligations of citizenship in war-torn African countries; lectures on religious freedom and civil society.
“Creating structures of civil society under indigenous leadership is a necessary building block of democratic politics and social progress,” says Sanneh, who has authored several books on religion in Africa.
The Project on Religious Freedom & Society in Africa is part of the World Christianity Initiative, located on the Yale University campus in the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.
From its beginnings, the Church of Scientology has recognized that freedom of religion is a fundamental human right. In a world where conflicts are often traceable to intolerance of others’ religious beliefs and practices, the Church has, for more than 50 years, made the preservation of religious liberty an overriding concern. The Church publishes this blog to help create a better understanding of the freedom of religion and belief and provide news on religious freedom and issues affecting this freedom around the world.
