Layers of evidence: discourse and typologies of faith-inspired community response to HIV/AIDS in Africa

This paper has two objectives. The first is to provide a review of the discourses about the religious response to HIV/AIDS in Africa that have emerged from the recent literature, how these discourses has changed over time (from religiophobia to a cautious recognition of the comparative value of faith-inspired interventions), and the conflicting typologies of faith-inspired initiatives that they have inspired. Noting the limits of the existing typologies, the second objective is to suggest conceptually some of the ways in which typologies could be combined in order to be made more useful from an operational point of view