Modern Religions and Successful Change

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This study covers academic research and personal involvement in religious in Africa, Asia and Europe and showed constant change in individual and group understandings of their religion and the gap with theological thinking about what people wanted from their faiths. This work showed that there are no simple religious paradigms whatever the type or intellectual capacity of the individuals and communities involved; they are all complex. Each religious act has a fan of meanings and each meaning has a fan of different understandings in constant flux. At the same time these acts are mingled with political, social, economic and psychological factors so that religious practices cannot be seen as a separate category of human behaviuor. The importance and survival of any faith depends on the degree to which its meanings are underfined an the amount of ambiguity which this allows for believers to seek and obtain their own fulfillments.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ralph Tanner

Ralph Tanner has a B.Sc. and Diploma in Social anthropology from Oxford University and a D.Phil in Law from Stockholm University. He has done field work in the Philoppines, Thailand, Guyana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Kenya. He was Chairman of the East African Institute of Social Research and a Lecturer in Comparative Religion in the University of London. He has published books on Murder in Uganda, Witchcraft Killings and Religious change in Tanzania and co-authored two books on the Biology of Religion, two on the recreation of tribal identity and religious change and another on religion and the environment. He has written numerous articles on the social aspects of religion and social change in the Journal of Modern African Studies, Africa, Journal of MOdern African Studies, Africa, Journal of Social Sciences, Nordic Journal of African Studies, Studia Missionalia, Anthropos etc. He is currently writing on the violent polarities of religious behaviour in contemporary eastern and western cultures.