Elias Bongmba


Elias Kifon Bongmba is a Cameroonian-American theologian.

Biography

Bongmba received a BA from Sioux Falls College in 1987, an M.Div. from North American Baptist Seminary in Sioux Falls in 1989, an MA from the University of Iowa in 1991, and a Ph.D. from Iliff School of Theology in 1995. He is Professor of Religion at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and holds the Harry and Hazel Chair in Christian Theology. His research focuses on Global Christianity and African and African Diaspora religions. He currently serves as the editor of Journal of Religion in Africa, is a member of the American Academy of Religion, and is president of the African Association for the Study of Religion

Awards

Elias Bongmba has received several awards over the years recognizing and honoring his contributions to his fields of study. In 2007 Bongmba was awarded the Frantz Fanon Prize, presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association, for Outstanding Work in Caribbean Thought for his work Dialectics of Transformation in Africa. In 2020 Bongmba received the Ray L. Hart Service Award for his dedication to his field of study.

Works

Toward a Hermeneutic of Wimbum Tfu,
  • African Witchcraft and Otherness: A Philosophical and Theological Critique of Intersubjective Relations,.
  • On Love: Literary Images of A Phenomenology of Love in Ngugi Wa Thong'o's 'The River Between',
  • Fabian and Levinas on Time and the Other: Ethical Implications,
  • Reflections on Thabo Mbekis African Renaissance, The Dialectics of Transformation in Africa,
  • Facing a Pandemic: The African Church and the Crisis of AIDS,
  • Phenomenological Humanism: Lewis Gordon on Reclaiming the Human in an Anti-Human World,
  • Beyond Reason to Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Morality and Politics in Africa: Comments on E. C. Eze’s ‘Between History and the Gods: Reason, Morality, and Politics in Today’s Africa,
  • A Comment on Friedman and Rossi’s Dialectical Theory and the Study of HIV/AIDS: A Broad Marxist Critique,
  • The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions,
  • Responsibility and Governance,
  • Homosexuality and Otherness in the African Church,
  • Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis: Traditional Ghanaian Beliefs and Global Health,
  • Church, Disability, and Development: The Case of the Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Board,
  • Land Disputes and Family Ties in Cameroon: Debating the Possibilities of Reconciliation,
  • What Has Kinshasa to Do with Athens?: Methodological Perspectives on Theology and Social Science in Search for a Political Theology,