The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events
Wednesday, 12 November 2025, 18:15
Venue: Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg
Research Group »Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities« (POLY)Lecture
Asonzeh Ukah (University of Cape Town)
»From Water to Fire: How Baptismal Rituals Shape Power and Authority in African Christianities«About the lecture
With an estimated 550 – 650 million adherents, African Christians represent a substantial and dynamic segment of the global Christian community. Because Christianity in Africa is profoundly heterogeneous, it is more accurate to speak of African Christianities. At the heart of this diversity lies the ritual of baptism – a focal point around which disparate African Christian traditions intertwine theology, cultural symbolism, and communal practice.
Drawing on archival material, ethnographic studies, and fieldwork within African Pentecostal Charismatic communities, this lecture foregrounds the most salient aspects of baptismal rituals across the continent. In essence, baptism in Africa is both a rite and a contested space – shaping identity, belonging, and spatial-temporal reconfigurations. It mirrors the pressing challenges and emerging opportunities that African Christians navigate amid rapid socio-political and religio-economic change.
About the speaker
Asonzeh Ukah is Chair of Religious Studies at the Department for the Study of Religions at Cape Town University and Director of the African Centre for Religions, Ethics and Society (ACRES). In 2024/25 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study Berlin).
Organizers
The llecture is organized by the Frankfurt Research Group »Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities« (POLY) in cooperation with the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität frankfurt (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Goethe University Frankfurt).
Registration
For better planning, we kindly ask you to register in advance at:
anmeldung@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de. You will receive a confirmation of registration.
In order to provide you with the best online experience this website uses cookies. Delete cookies
By using our website, you agree to the data protection declaration and to the use of cookies.
Learn more
I agree
Cookies are short reports that are sent and stored on the hard drive of the user's computer through your browser when it connects to a web. Cookies can be used to collect and store user data while connected to provide you the requested services and sometimes tend not to keep. Cookies can be themselves or others.
There are several types of cookies:
- Technical cookies that facilitate user navigation and use of the various options or services offered by the web as identify the session, allow access to certain areas, facilitate orders, purchases, filling out forms, registration, security, facilitating functionalities (videos, social networks, etc..).
- Customization cookies that allow users to access services according to their preferences (language, browser, configuration, etc..).
- Analytical cookies which allow anonymous analysis of the behavior of web users and allow to measure user activity and develop navigation profiles in order to improve the websites.
So when you access our website, in compliance with Article 22 of Law 34/2002 of the Information Society Services, in the analytical cookies treatment, we have requested your consent to their use. All of this is to improve our services. We use Google Analytics to collect anonymous statistical information such as the number of visitors to our site. Cookies added by Google Analytics are governed by the privacy policies of Google Analytics. If you want you can disable cookies from Google Analytics.
However, please note that you can enable or disable cookies by following the instructions of your browser.