Tribute to Lamin Sanneh
It is with great saddness that we announce the sudden death of Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School, and Director of the Project on Religious Freedom and Society in Africa at the MacMillan Center. Many colleagues were with Lamin just before the Christmas break when he was anticipating the arrival of his family and the celebration of Christmas. An announcement like this seemed unimaginable; however, Lamin suffered a stroke and passed away on Sunday, January 6, 2019, surrounded by his family. (Read the set of remembrances published by Christianity Today.)
Lamin was born on MacCarthy Island in the River Gambia. A descendent of an ancient African royal family, he grew up as a Muslim but converted to Christianity. He was educated and taught on four different continents. He earned graduate degrees from the University of Birmingham, England (M.A.), and the University of London (Ph.D.). He received honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh and Liverpool Hope University. His major faculty appointments were at the University of Ghana (1975-1978), the University of Aberdeen (1978-1981), Harvard University (1981-1989), and finally Yale (1989-2019). He had a lifetime appointment at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (1996-2019), and was an Honorary Professional Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1997-2019). He also had temporary appointments at the Centre for the Study of Islam and Christianity, Ibadan, Nigeria (1969-1971); Fourah Bay College, the University of Sierra Leone, Freetown (1974-1975); San Francisco Theological Seminary (summer of 1987); and the Library of Congress, where he was the John W. Kluge Chair in the Countries and Cultures of the South (2004-2005). Lamin took a long and circuitous route from The Gambia to Yale University, but he traveled with international distinction.
Lamin was the author or editor or co-editor of twenty books and monograph-length essays and well over 200 articles and chapters in scholarly venues. Some of the most notable books include Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Orbis, 1989; 13th printing 2002; 2nd ed., 2009), Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Harvard University Press, 2000; selected for review in The New York Review of Books), Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Eerdmans, 2003; trans. into German, 2013), Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford, 2008), Beyond Jihad: Pacifist Impetus in Muslim West Africa and Beyond (Oxford, 2016), and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Christianity, co-edited with Michael McClymond (Wiley, 2016). His work was widely recognized for its quality. He was made Commandeur de l’Ordre National du Lion, Senegal’s highest honor, in 2002 and received the Marianist Award from the University of Dayton in 2011.
Lamin and Andrew Walls set up a program of World Christianity conferences that alternated between Yale and Edinburgh each summer and brought distinguished international scholars to each university. He was a member of the board of Overseas Ministry Study Center and the key link between the OMSC and YDS. Lamin also had an appointment as Professor of History.
Lamin’s work was recently recognized by the University of Ghana in its establishment of the Lamin Sanneh Institute, which will promote scholarly research into religion and society in Africa, especially emphasizing the roles of Christianity and Islam, the two areas of Lamin’s expertise. You can read more about the new Sanneh Institute here.
Lamin’s story is remarkable by any standard of measurement. It is best understood in his own words in Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African (Eerdmans, 2012).
Our prayers and thoughts go out to Sandra Sanneh, the children, and the grandchildren, who will miss their husband, father, and grandfather.