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Understanding Folk Religion: A Christian Response to Popular Beliefs and Practices is unavailable, but you can change that!

Around the world, Christian churches face the challenge of folk religions. Missionaries brought formal Christianity and assumed that traditional religions would die out as the Gospel displaced animistic beliefs and practices. Today, it is clear that old ways do not die out, but instead remain largely hidden from view. People affirm orthodox theologies, but go to witch doctors, shamans, diviners,...

leaders see the world first as the people and then as they themselves see it, but these do not provide a bridge for communication between cultures, nor a framework to compare cultures. By learning to live deeply in two or more cultures, people learn to construct metacultural grids, or analytical frameworks that are outside any one specific culture. This “etic” view of an outside observer enables bicultural people such as missionaries to translate between cultures and languages, and to compare them.
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