Join Ilana van Wyk for the Launch of her book, A Church of Strangers: The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa at the University of Cape Town.
The launch, which is being hosted by HUMA, will be on Wednesday, 19 August, from 1 to 2:30 PM. Van Wyk will be speaking about her book, which is the culmination of her anthropological research on new forms of Christianity and the intersection of money and religion.
Date: Wednesday, 19 August 2015
Time: 1 PM to 2:30 PM
Venue: HUMA Seminar Room
4th Floor, The Neville Alexander Building (formerly known as the Humanities Building), University Avenue South
UCT Upper Campus
More information: HUMA, [email protected], 021 650 4592
About the book:
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a church of
Brazilian origin, has been enormously successful in establishing
branches and attracting followers in post-apartheid South Africa.
Unlike other Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCC), the UCKG
insists that relationships with God be devoid of ‘emotions’, that
socialisation between members be kept to a minimum and that charity
and fellowship are ‘useless’ in materialising God’s blessings. Instead,
the UCKG urges members to sacrifi ce large sums of money to God
for delivering wealth, health, social harmony and happiness. While
outsiders condemn these rituals as empty or manipulative, this book
shows that they are locally meaningful, demand sincerity to work,
have limits and are informed by local ideas about human bodies,
agency and ontological balance. As an ethnography of people rather
than of institutions, this book offers fresh insights into the mass PCC
movement that has swept across Africa since the early 1990s.