The election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, as Pope Francis nearly two years ago is only one illustration of how the Catholic Church has become less concentrated in Europe and North America than in the southern hemisphere. Nearly half of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics live in Latin America, and the Catholic Church in Africa, home to the largest seminaries in the world, is growing at an annual rate of more than 3 percent.

Read More about Truly Christian and African: Notre Dame theologian Paulinus Odozor’s new book

“The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora,” a new book edited by Hugh R. Page Jr., dean of the First Year of Studies and associate professor of Theology and Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame, recently was published by Fortress Press.

Page directed a team of editors from the Society of Biblical Literature’s African-American Biblical Hermeneutics Section in gathering a groundbreaking collection of essays by biblical scholars from Africa and the African Diaspora.

Read More about Notre Dame’s First Year Dean Hugh Page edits new book on Africana biblical studies