Big Money, Big Science, and God’s Big World In my last post I presented the objections to spending billions on big science projects such as the Large Hadron Collider. Questions certainly arise in the face of this massive public spending, when we live in a world in which millions of people are hungry and lack access…

Is there such a thing as “good witchcraft”? Witchcraft discourse now plays an important role in the understanding of modernity and the progress that some have made in a technologically sophisticated world (Cf. Opoku Onyinah, Pentecostal Exorcism, p. 4). In an early 1970s highlife hit a popular Ghanaian musician sang that “white witchcraft” is good…

In my last post, “Identities of Accused Witches,” I listed the most common identities of those who are said to be witches. The question for this post is, “how do we know and identify a witch?” Basically, the question is that of epistemology and it is an important one in dealing with the whole question of…

One of the critical features of the way that people talk about “witchcraft” in African contexts is the idea that witches do not usually identify themselves publicly. After all, they are engaged in antisocial behavior, and so it is to be expected that they would want to remain hidden from view.[1] The challenge for ordinary…

In the understanding of Lugbara people, children can become witches if they are initiated by adults. The same could be true in other cultures because in the cosmopolitan town of Bunia (Eastern DRC), many children have been accused of witchcraft in recent years. Those ones I want to talk about in these following lines live…

It is held that witches are organized into covens on local, national, and international levels. In the covens are kings, queens, messengers and executioners. At night, when witches sleep, it is believed that their souls fly out of their physical bodies to meetings. In my previous presentations–“What is Witchcraft?” and “Witchcraft: Physical or Spiritual?”–I attempted…

Bishop “Moses” (names have been changed throughout) was a respected spiritual church leader from Rwanda. He spent decades building a strong church movement of nearly fifty churches across the Rwanda and Burundi borders into Tanzania. Although this area is a seven-hour drive from where I lived in Mwanza, Tanzania, I stayed overnight for up to…

Over 20 thousand street children, most of them orphans, roam the streets of Kinshasa. In response to the biblical call for God’s people to care for orphans, an organization of Congolese pastors led by Pastor Abel Ngolo called Equipe Pastorale Aupres des Enfants en Détresse (Pastoral Team for Children in Distress), and in partnership with…

In her book Our Religious Heritage, Bahemuka observes that, Witchcraft is partly inherited and partly taught from one generation to the next. Africans believe that witchcraft is in the blood of the witches, and, just like genetic inheritance, witchcraft passes from mother to daughter and father to son. The outward paraphernalia of witchcraft which is…

The Daily Guide is one of the most popular private newspapers in Ghana. Many of the sensational stories from such newspapers deal with the supernatural, especially witchcraft. Crash Landing and the “Arsenal” of Prayer In November 2013, the Daily Guide published an article with the headline “wizard crash lands.” The article was accompanied by the picture…

Suffering in all forms is pervasive and present in all humans regardless of age, race, religion, status, or sex. It is almost as if human beings are born to suffer.  From the beginning of the first humans, suffering has been part of human existence. It is natural for human beings to seek the cause(s) of…

Aru is the name of my small home town located in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in the Ituri District. It could have been called the “Salem of DRC.” In June 2001, several hundred people accused of witchcraft were brutally killed exclusively in Aru, one of the counties of the…