Below is a list of Father Emmanuel’s published books. Clicking on the titles will bring you to sites if you would like to purchase or rent one. Thanks for your support!
From the Publisher: What does it mean for Christians in Africa to receive the gift and invitation of reconciliation in the midst of the stubborn realities of war, poverty, and violence? Here, Emmanuel Katongole outlines a theological vision of reconciliation as God’s journey with creation — both gift and mission. He then explores the ecclesiological dimension of reconciliation and provides different portraits on why and how the church matters for reconciliation in Africa. Finally, he draws on stories of peace activists in Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda to illuminate the spiritual and practical disciplines that sustain those who labor for reconciliation.
From the Introduction: There is no more urgent theological task than to provide an account of hope in Africa, given its endless cycles of violence, war, poverty, and displacement. So claims Emmanuel Katongole, an innovative theological voice from Africa.
In the midst of suffering, Katongole says, hope takes the form of “arguing” and “wrestling” with God. Such lament is not merely a cry of pain—it is a way of mourning, protesting, and appealing to God. As he unpacks the rich theological and social dimensions of the practice of lament in Africa, Katongole tells the stories of courageous Christian activists working for change in East Africa and invites readers to enter into lament along with them.
From the Introduction: In Stories from Bethany, Fr. Emmanuel Katongole writes biblical reflections on the Church in Africa based on the Gospel stories associated with the village of Bethany: Marth, Mary, Lazarus, and the Fig tree. Through these reflections, he helps the reader to reflect on the concrete realities of the Church in Africa, to see the gifts and possibilities as well as the challenges that the gospel offers the Church in Africa. He offers these reflections particularly to African Christian leaders and theologians as an example of a particular methodology and a way of doing theology in an African context… This book is therefore intended as a resource for personal or group reflection and discussion on Christian mission in Africa.
From the Publisher: Modern Africa, scarred by its founding narratives of colonial oppression and nation-state politics, has been especially vulnerable to chaos, war, and corruption. Its people – mired within a seemingly endless cycle of violence, plunder, and poverty – have seen their resources exploited and their lives wantonly sacrificed time and again to the greed and ambition of oppressive regimes.
In The Sacrifice of Africa Emmanuel Katongole confronts this painful legacy and shows how it continues to warp the imaginative landscape of African politics and society. He demonstrates the real potential of Christianity to interrupt and transform entrenched political imaginations and create a different story for Africa — a story of self-sacrificing love that values human dignity and “dares to invent” a new and better future for all Africans.
Compelling accounts of three African Christian leaders and their work — Bishop Paride Taban in Sudan, Angelina Atyam in Uganda, and Maggy Barankitse in Burundi — cap off Katongole’s inspiring vision of hope for Africa.
From the Publisher: 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.
From Publisher’s Weekly: This book inaugurates the Resources for Reconciliation series, a joint venture of the publisher and Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation. The two authors, co-directors of the center, bring perspectives that pair perfectly: Catholic and evangelical Protestant, African and American, academic and practitioner, ordained and lay. Each also brings powerful life experience in confronting oppression and injustice: Katongole grew up under Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and lived near the Rwandan genocide. After growing up a missionary kid in South Korea, Rice worked for 17 years in an urban ministry in Jackson, Miss. Against a background of difference, the two argue for a vision of reconciliation that is neither trendy nor pragmatically diplomatic, neither cheaply inclusive nor heedless of the past. The reconciliation they explain and hold out hope for is distinctively Christian: a God-ordained transformation of the consequences of the fall into the new creation spoken about by the apostle Paul. Deeply theological, this short book needs slow reading by anyone interested in harnessing the power of the spirit for social change.
Civil war, famine, genocide, AIDS—Africa has endured some of the most horrific human tragedies of recent times. The rapid rise of a Christian social ethics movement, however, suggests a powerful coping mechanism for African peoples. One of the leaders of this movement is Emmanuel Katongole, a Catholic priest in Uganda. In A Future for Africa, Katongole wrestles with Africa’s concrete and debilitating problems, including poverty, corruption, and tribalism, and then offers humanitarian and faith-filled solutions. The work fills a vacancy in the current debate about lasting solutions to Africa’s problems and should be meaningful reading for scholars of ethics and religion alike.
This book brings together twelve essays on a wide and rich range of topics, discussions and methodologies in African theology today. African Theology Today features essays by such distinguished African theologians as Musa Dube, J.N.K. Mugambi, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, and Gerald West. It also includes two of Emmanuel’s own chapters, “Mission and Social Formation: Searching for an Alternative to King Leopold’s Ghost,” and “African Renaissance and the Challenge of Narrative Theology in Africa.”
From the Publisher: Emmanuel Katongole offers a defense of Hauerwas’s position by showing how the problem of ethics and religion is created and sustained by the ahistorical conception of the moral life in general, and moral rationality in particular, assumed within the dominant Kantian moral tradition.
In Beyond Universal Reason, Katongole develops a comprehensive, theoretical framework for a better appreciation of Hauerwas’s work, and demonstrates that Hauerwas’s claim about the relation between religion and ethics makes sense only within the wider framework of his attempt to set aside Kantian moral tradition. This volume is a testimony to the scholarship of Stanley Hauerwas and an invaluable resource for understanding his work, as well as a rewarding addition to the study of moral reason.