This is a collection of essays on the modern cultural/Christian history of the north of Ghana. The essays, mainly by scholars from the area, celebrate Peter Poreku Dery whose life (c. 1918–2008) spanned much of this history, and who played a not inconsiderable role in it. First ‘an assistant fetish priest’, he was baptised in 1932, became the first Dagara priest in 1951, a bishop in 1960 and a cardinal in 2006. The process has been begun in Rome to declare him a saint. The essays are divided into three parts. Part i is entitled ‘Cultures in contact, religions in conflict’, and covers the relationship between local religious traditions and Christianity, which in the form of the Missionaries of Africa (‘White Fathers') entered northern Ghana from Upper Volta in 1906. Dery is here celebrated as a ‘bridge’ between local religious practice and Christianity, a champion of ‘inculturation’, and in reference to his ‘Dagara Missa’ even (rather hyperbolically) described as ‘the first bishop ever in the Catholic Church to compose non-Latin Mass Service’ (p. 23). The second part is entitled ‘Reconciling religions, reconciling people’, and focuses on the ‘how’ of this reconciliation, through reconciling African world views with biblical Christianity, not least by translating the Bible into local languages. The third is entitled ‘Renewing culture, renewing religion’, which broaches mainly the role of Western education in Ghana's north (pioneered and still dominated by the Catholic Church), and changes in the status of women in the area. This very Catholic and very personal treatment of northern Ghanaian history and culture is a welcome contribution, which could have been even more impressive with more rigorous editing and copy-editing.