Emmanuel Katongole - Rwanda & the Ministry of Reconciliation

Voices of the Global Church

Emmanuel Katongole & Graham Hill discuss Rwanda and the church’s ministry of peacemaking and reconciliation. Rwanda is a mirror to the church. They discuss identity, lament, healing, reconciliation, hope, and forgiveness. The GlobalChurch Project, Episode 16.

“Rwanda is often held up as a model of evangelization in Africa. Yet in 1994, beginning on the Thursday of Easter week, Christians killed other Christians, often in the same churches where they had worshiped together. The most Christianized country in Africa became the site of its worst genocide. With a mother who was a Hutu and a father who was a Tutsi, author Emmanuel Katongole is uniquely qualified to point out that the tragedy in Rwanda is also a mirror reflecting the deep brokenness of the church in the West. Rwanda brings us to a cry of lament on our knees where together we learn that we must interrupt these patterns of brokenness. But Rwanda also brings us to a place of hope. Indeed, the only hope for our world after Rwanda’s genocide is a new kind of Christian identity for the global body of Christ—a people on pilgrimage together, a mixed group, bearing witness to a new identity made possible by the Gospel.”

Katongole’s research interests focus on politics and violence in Africa, the theology of reconciliation, and Catholicism in the global South.

He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain and a diploma in theology and religious studies from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

Katongole, a Catholic priest ordained by the Archdiocese of Kampala, has served as associate professor of theology and world Christianity at Duke University, where he was the founding co-director of the Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation.

He is the author of books on the Christian social imagination, the crisis of faith following the genocide in Rwanda, and Christian approaches to justice, peace, and reconciliation. His most recent book is The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa (Eerdmans, 2010).

Professor Katongole’s other books include Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith after Genocide in Rwanda, (Zondervan, 2009), A Future for Africa: Critical Essays in Christian Social Imagination (University of Scranton Press, 2005), African Theology Today (University of Scranton Press, 2002), and Beyond Universal Reason: The Relation Between Religion and Ethics in the Work of Stanley Hauerwas (Notre Dame Press, 2000).

As a major part of his research at the Kroc Institute, Katongole will contribute to Contending Modernities, a cross-cultural research and education initiative examining Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world.