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Many Christian churches in parts of Ghana dominated by Akans do not allow corpses to be brought inside the church during funerals services. Others face constant and vehement objection when it is done. Cultural differences on the subject have fuelled heated disputes that have led in some cases to severe congregational division. Opposition is often sustained by a culturally biased approach to biblical texts concerning sacredness and defilement as related to Old Testament sanctuary and temple ritual. Particularly, the religious philosophy of mmusuo provides the psycho-emotive motivation from which many Akan Christians vehemently oppose the practice as sacrilegious. It also provides an analytical and rhetorical framework for appropriating various biblical passages relating to religious sacrilege. This paper unpacks this framework and proposes effectively contextualized theology as a means of avoiding such erroneous conflations and resolving the disputes that arise at the interface of African culture and Christian religion, especially in multicultural congregations.

As social media democratize participation in the public sphere, new voices are emerging that challenge the status quo of public political discussion in important ways. In particular, social media are allowing ordinary citizens to offer their appraisals of government policy and their diagnoses of the problems besetting development. Through a rhetorical analysis of online videos by selected social commentators, we show how development is framed by today’s Ghanaian youth as an engagement with local and global vistas. Although lacking in nuanced historical and theoretical framing, and espousing an idealized-Western vision of development, our interlocutors play an important role in spurring active youth engagement in democratic discourse and in bringing to the popular stage contemporary national and global discourses surrounding development, identity, and the role of digital media in shaping modern public debate in democratic societies.