Middle-class Christians in Ghana’s capital Accra voice ambivalence about paying taxes: some claim that the government wastes their hard-earned money, while others consider taxes a Christian duty enshrined in the scripture. By contrast, most Christians in Accra esteem tithes to churches as contributions that yield infrastructural ‘development’ and divine favor. Drawing on the explicit comparisons that Ghanaian Christians make between the benefits of paying taxes vis-à-vis paying tithes, this article argues that taxes exist as part of a wider conceptual universe of monetary transfers. The efficacy of such transfers is evaluated in relation to what I call a ‘rightful return’. The unveiling of tithes as the counterpoint to taxes ultimately elicits an emergent Ghanaian conception of the public good between the state and God’s Kingdom.

Nine Ghanaian private banks collapsed during the country’s 2017–19 financial crisis. Apart from public audits that revealed liquidity problems and large portfolios of non-performing loans, the crisis generated vibrant debate on ‘indigenous banks’ as integral to national economic sovereignty. At the centre of these debates was a contested central bank-led project to inject equity in five struggling Ghanaian banks through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), Ghana Amalgamated Trust (GAT). Set against the historical dominance of foreign banks in West Africa and Ghana’s recent history of political fault lines, this article explores the moral discourses and popular discontents of harnessing an SPV – a device typically used to isolate financial risk – for a desire for African economic sovereignty. Drawing on banking archives, public debates and fieldwork in a private bank selected as a benefactor of the SPV, I focus on the contests of value that emerge when costly banking sector reforms meet a critical public that doubts the sincerity of politicians and bankers as economic ‘reformers’. Arguing that ‘indigenous banks’ became a moral category that embedded abstractions of finance in a nationalist discourse of affect and sentiment, this article illuminates the long history of centring domestic ownership of financial infrastructures in postcolonial African economic policymaking.

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We are glad to launch a new format of a dialogic book review symposium with Joel Robbins’s (2020) Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life. With contributions from anthropologist Minna Opas, theologian Mika Vähäkangas, and a response from Robbins, this is the first instalment of dialogic encounters on books that cross disciplinary boundaries. Similar to Robbins’s (2020: 13) notion of ‘transformative dialogue’ between anthropology and theology, this new format takes dialogue to be at the heart of the art and practice of book reviewing. In future instalments, we invite scholars from different disciplines to comment on books written by anthropologists from the point of view of their interdisciplinary transformative potential, including the limits of this potential to be actualized in the present. At the core, we are interested in anthropological concept formation at the interface of fieldwork and other disciplines, and how anthropological concepts have influence beyond anthropological theory. If you have suggestions on books that you would like to propose for a dialogic book review symposium, please get in touch.

Ghana's capital Accra has seen a boom in markets of personal development. In recent years, the industry has been characterised by Charismatic Christian discourses of the making of the competitive citizen-subject, which propose deeper Christian faith results in economic prosperity and national economic development. Adopting a long-term historical perspective on personal development in Ghana where 'character building' closely dovetails with nation-building, I explore the industry through the lens of young Charismatic Pentecostal media practitioners who produce spiritually motivated personal development programs. Situated in a context where the popularity of Charismatic Pentecostal Christianity has risen hand in hand with post-1990s currents of neoliberal economic transformations, they frame personal development as a spiritual regime that enacts productive citizenship in Christian terms. Somewhat at odds with critical scholarship on personal development as a medium of neoliberal governmentality that shifts responsibility for social change from the collective to the individual, the young entrepreneurs in question view Christian faith as a revolutionary force in advancing Ghana's economic position. In dialogue with recent debates on the depoliticising effects associated with the globalisation of therapeutic industries of personal development, I draw attention to a multiplicity of historical macro-regimes, post-colonial African nationbuilding in particular, that make personal development a distinctive global scene at the interface of 'the world' and God's Kingdom.