Elochukwu Uzukwu, C.S.Sp., is Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. He is the editor of Bulletin of Ecumenical Theology, and author of Liturgy, Truly Christian, Truly African (1982); A Listening Church: Autonomy and Communion in African Churches/ (1996; 2006); Worship as Body Language: Introduction to Christian Worship, an African Orientation (1997).
 

God, Spirit, and Human Wholeness: Appropriating Faith and Culture in West African Style | Order Here

The Holy Spirit provides access to relationship with and reflection on the Triune God. In West Africa, Christians approach the Triune God in a way that challenges the Jewish-Christian memory. Deeply rooted in their ancestral memory, where living is relationality, they embrace the Trinitarian faith, the economy of the relational God-Christ-Spirit, by expanding and reinventing their indigenous experience of God, deities, spirits, and ancestors. Christian faith-practice is marked by the spectacular dominance of the Holy Spirit, whose charisms reflect the operations of deities. African Initiated Churches (AICs), Protestant and Catholic charismatic movements, experience God-Spirit’s liberating and healing hand for the enhancement and realization of communal and individual destiny (what one expects from a concerned providential deity). This book argues that the emergent West African Trinitarian imagination is in harmony with Hebrew insight into the One and Only Yahweh of the patriarchs that assumed the dimensions of Elohîm, God—experienced as a sound of sheer silence by Elijah, and proposed in utter weakness as the Only God by Deutero-Isaiah—the God that Jesus called Abba, Father. As Spirit and Life, the Holy Spirit, which is the source of all charisms (Origen), is our link to the Trinity.

A Listening Church: Autonomy and Communion in African Churches | Order Here

A Listening Church: Autonomy and Communion in African Churches presents the problems and challenges facing the Catholic church in Africa today. Uzukwu briefly describes the historical development of the church in the period of colonialism. Nevertheless, the author focuses his primary attention on how the church can respond today to African needs.

Worship As Body Language: Introduction to Christian Worship: An African Orientation | Order Here

Worship sets an assembly in motion movement towards God in response to God’s movement towards humans thus creating a resilient and caring community. Worship as Body Language brings the African community’s experience of the body and its gestures together with the Christian liturgy, since worship and social action are closely related. The “body language” or gestures of praise, adoration, contemplation, ritual dance, and care of the neighbor are meaningful to the ethnic group; African Christians tune into these body motions to express the one Christian faith. In Worship as Body Language, Father Uzukwu details how patterns of African ritual assemblies and sacred narratives have merged with Jewish, gospel, and early Church traditions to create living Christian communities and liturgies. Using a socio-historical method, this book sheds new light on liturgical action and theology, and suggests more transition rituals. It also provides samples of emergent African Christian liturgies that emphasize intense community participation with appropriate gestures. These local liturgies attest to the patristic principle that different customs actually confirm the unity of our faith in Christ. Scholars teaching and researching the foundations of the liturgy and liturgical inculturation, graduate students, and those organizing workshops on the regional, diocesan, or parish level will find Worship as Body Language a ready handbook on the liturgy. It is also a useful textbook for introducing college students and seminarians to the anthropological, historical, and theological dimensions of the liturgy.