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In the thirtieth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Rev. Emmanuel Katongole, Professor of Theology and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Katongole opens by discussing how he came to understand reconciliation and that despite the stubbornness of sin, God is at work in the world, inviting all of us to play a role in that larger story of reconciliation. He then shares how he came to be called to the priesthood, the two times he enrolled in seminary, and how the first time he enrolled yielded a sense of purpose that made all the difference the second time he enrolled. Katongole discusses how he understands home, how he values the childhood and the connections he shares with the people of Uganda, but also how anywhere he lived (including Southern Europe, Northern Europe, the American South, the American Midwest) also contributed to how he understands himself and home. Katongole offers details concerning how his books each respectively seek to deepen how audience members understand that larger story of reconciliation. He then concludes by offering how he understands the academic vocation, the two stories that define it, and ways the Church and the university can be of greater service to one another in the years to come.
- Emmanuel Katongole, Who Are My People? Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022)
- Emmanuel Katongole, A Future for Africa: Critical Essays in Christian Social Imagination (Wipf & Stock, 2017)
- Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice, Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing (InterVaristy Press, 2008)
- Emmanuel Katongole, Beyond Universal Reason: The Relation Between Ethics and Religion in the Work of Stanley Hauerwas (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Father Emmanuel Katongole, Professor of Theology and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Thank you for joining us.
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: Thank you very much, Todd, for having me.
Todd Ream: Reconciliation is fundamental to God’s character and God’s desire to be in right relationship with humanity, a desire that hopefully infuses within humanity a desire to be in right relationship with God and with one another. As one who understands his vocation as a priest, a professor, and a pilgrim, how have you come to understand reconciliation?
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: Well, thank you, because that is at the core of what I do, reconciliation. But it’s surprising that it’s not actually until 2004 that I begin to connect, I began to connect my work with this notion of reconciliation. I grew up, was a Christian in Uganda, went to seminary, was ordained a priest in Uganda, then went to study at the Catholic University of Louvain for a PhD in philosophy, went back, started teaching and doing research in social-political philosophy, issues of violence really what I was calling for a new social imagination, especially within the continent, like Africa, with the endless cycles of violence and war and poverty. And so that’s what I was calling for.
But in 2001, I came to Duke University as a visiting professor. While there, I met this man, Chris Rice, who was coming from Mississippi, who was in my class, and so we were working together, was invited to lead a Lausanne team on reconciliation. He invited me, so that’s kind of where I started kind of really being drawn into the language, into the language of reconciliation.
And when he invited him into Lausanne, I said, well, I’m a Catholic priest. This is mostly an evangelical meeting, so, but out of friendship with Chris and Chris said I need to go. And we had that wonderful, wonderful meeting at Lausanne and, that issued in a statement, that we made, our issue group on reconciliation, about reconciliation as a mission of God.
So we came back to Duke, and I was thinking of continuing in my work but the dean at Duke Divinity School, then Greg Jones, says, Wait, how about the two of you coming together, working together and establishing a center for reconciliation at Duke? I said, why, I’m not so sure, because really, I don’t use the reconciliation as the overarching framework for my scholarship. My scholarship is about a kind of the social, political imaginations that are needed in Africa within the context of violence.
And then as we continue to talk with Greg and Chris, I began to realize that that actually is reconciliation, the kind of sociopolitical reimagination that I was calling for is what St. Paul has in mind when he’s talking about creation and connections with new and a reconciliation and connection with a new creation.
So, the more that I studied this Pauline use of the language of reconciliation, I saw that for Paul, this was the reality that God is using to kind of bring into existence—this whole new creation. So the text of 2 Corinthians 5:17 was very, very formative. And there Paul is announcing a new creation. Uh, the old is gone, the new is here. And God is doing that through, and then He comes up with this notion of catalago or reconciliation. But the reality that he’s talking about is much bigger than the notion which we find in the New Testament.
So I began to see that Herculean that Paul is providing, is an overarching story of what God is doing in the world. God reconciling all things, God drawing all things to Himself and making everything new. That discovery of that big story for me was decisive, and then I began to realize that reconciliation is not only a mission of God, but it is the drama, into which all creation is drawn.
So then I began to see that, okay, my work is located within this overarching drama of God’s reconciling love in the world. That was very, very decisive for me, and that kind of changed the way that I was doing my scholarship. But that was so good, went hand-in-hand with the establishment of the center for reconciliation and meeting with various Christians around the world. Just kind of again, to remind ourselves of the drama of the story within which God is drawing the whole of creation, human beings included.
I was very, very fortunate in a way to discover that overarching story and to see my life and my work located within that drama of God’s reconciling love. So that’s how I really became a reconciliation theologian, a reconciliation scholar, if you like. Not that I have very, very specific skills of how to do this but in terms of the story within which all our engagements in the world are located, and this is the overarching story of God.
Todd Ream: With that understanding in mind, and when you think through participants in that story that you’ve had the privilege of meeting, would you highlight someone who has exercised the grace and wisdom of God’s reconciliation in ways that has inspired you?
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: Well, you know, one of the things that came out of that work, one of the graces that came out of that work for me as a scholar, was in the academy, forming the Center for Reconstitution, drawing together people from all walks of life, practitioners, Christians from around the world. One of the gifts that emerged out of that is the coming in contact with these concrete lives, but also the stories, the incredible stories of what people are doing in different locations around the world.
My area of focus was mostly in terms of research was Africa, understandably so because that’s where I am born and raised and so forth. So as we gathered Christians, we would come across these incredible stories that I didn’t even know existed before. Take for example, the story of this woman, Angelina Atyam from Northern Uganda, whose daughter was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army and who led a whole movement of forgiveness grounded again within this story of God reconciling all things. And this is what we are called to be because God forgives us. And therefore, we also are participants in that drama, extending forgiveness to the rebels.
At a particular time, also going to visit with the mother of the rebel who was holding her daughter in captivity, and spending time with her in the evening and the two women crying, both for their children, one abducted and other one a rebel, so a very, very powerful story of reconciliation. But that kind of itself within, again, that overarching drama. And she, Angelina, to claim that she could do that because she felt that she had received that gift and therefore, going over to extend the same gift. So the kind of the pattern of standing within the story, receiving that gift, and then extending it to others.
And when the rebels began to hear what she was doing, because she was talking too much on the radio and calling for them to end violence, they wanted to strike a deal with her that she should keep quiet because it was drawing negative publicity on them. In exchange, they would release her daughter. And for her to be able to say, okay, that is very good, but unless you release all the other girls, I’m not going to stop because every child is my child. And so she went back home without her daughter, who continued to be held in captivity, but because she had come to a sense that every child is my child.
In short, incredible stories and she, in the end, saying this journey that she has learned about forgiveness, about reconciliation, is such a beautiful delightful journey but also a painful journey. So she began to let me to see the intersection of lament and hope. Eventually her daughter escaped and was reunited.
But as she talks about her story, it is that that actually began to draw my attention within the Christian practice, how lament and hope go hand in hand. And there can be no reconciliation without learning to live at that intersection between lament and hope.
So it’s stories like this that I know it drew me even deeper into understanding the whole Christian framework of life, of theology, such an extent that, yeah, whatever I’m doing as a scholar, as a practitioner, as a priest, as a pilgrim, is within that framework, is within that drama, that story that Paul refers to by the name of reconciliation.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Yeah, beautiful story.
I want to ask you about, at this intersection of lament and hope, are there any particular theological virtues that you think are more critical for individuals to receive or moral and intellectual virtues perhaps for individuals to cultivate?
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: Yes, definitely because if we think about reconciliation as not as a finished product, first of all, God’s journey that realizes this gift of reconciliation that is offered to us, that we are drawn into that journey, first of all, as a recipient, but also as, now, ambassadors. That’s the invitation to also be part of that story as ambassadors.
If you think about that as a journey that is never realized once and for all, and as Paul says, we are in this in between the already and not yet. So we started kind of redrawing attention to the kind of gifts and disciplines, you call them virtues, that are needed if you want to engage that journey.
And I identified a number of them. The first one, though, is the gift of the imagination, which is connected to the gift of memory. Remember, toward what? If a reconciliation is a journey, toward what? What is the goal? What’s the, what’s the tiros? What’s the purpose? And so imagining that new creation, remembering the story that actually God has reconciled the word to Himself. If we do not have that memory, in a way, we cannot imagine that new creation that has already been realized. There is no way that we can engage the journey.
And then we talked about the gift of lament. The willingness to stand and bear pain, because if we don’t learn to stand and bear pain, we give way to either easy reconciliations, easy solutions, peace, peace when there is no peace or despair. The violence, the corruption, the endless, in a way, stubbornness of sin is so real, we don’t even seem to be making any progress. So unless we cultivate the disciplines of lament, of learning what it means to stand on the ground of pain without despair, we give in to it as a consolation or despair or cynicism.
Then the gift of hope, the discipline of hope, the virtue of hope, hope, not only as the ability to see what signs God is planting, even in the midst of violence, conflict and so forth, God is always planting seeds of hope as He says in Isaiah, always making a new thing. Can you see it? So hoping the first place is an invitation for us to see the signs, that even in the midst of the worst form of violence, they are seeds of hope.
But also hope is a practice, is an invitation to participate in those signs of hope in the sewing, if you like, of hope, in the commitment to realizing hope grounded within what we care for. So hope really as an action as, as a vow, different forms of advocacy and that was very, very important for me, that virtue of hope.
At the same time, another virtue that is very, very significant is the virtue of spirituality. The ability to step back now and again, to replenish gifts that we internally need to be able to stand and walk with on the journey. Unless we’re able to do that, the journey is long. Solitude or quietness of contemplation, of meditation, of prayer, are a part of the virtues that, that the, that we need.
At the same time, in a way also to take away the sense that we are at the center of the story. Otherwise, we think that if we fail now, therefore, there is no reconciliation happening. No, the story is beyond us. But for us to stand within that humility, that actually we personally may fail, but that nevertheless, we are invited to be part of that. To answer that question, why me? Why even bother to go on when there are so much endless cycles of violence and how not to give up and sustain the journey over the long haul? So these are some of the virtues that I began to draw attention to and to cultivate, but also to point to as necessary, part of the journey of reconciliation.
Todd Ream: Thank you. And especially all along that we’re planting, as you said, seeds of hope, with a desire for that which brings reconciliation to grow out of that. But if nothing else, we’ve planted that in place so that we gain momentum for future generations to continue the work.
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: Which also connects immediately with the virtue of patience. The waiting, the planting of a seed, a small seed. And right now I’m involved in this work of Bethany Land Institute in Uganda, where we’re doing the deforestation and the planting. So fragile, so small. And to wait for it to grow, so it speaks about the virtues of fragility, of tenderness, and patience that even if we don’t, when we don’t see immediate results, nevertheless, something is going on.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now about your calling to the priesthood, and in particular, how your experiences of home may have contributed to that. As you mentioned earlier, you were educated in East Africa, Southern Europe, Northern Europe. Ordained in the archdiocese of Kampala, Uganda, and have served on the faculties of the University of Scranton, Duke University, and now at the University of Notre Dame. So tell me a little bit about home for you. You’ve made a home in each one of these places, but when you think about home and the fellowship that you find when you’re home, what is that like?
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: Yeah, I know these places are home in one, one way or another. They are all home. One African public intellectual, Selasi, gave a comment on a TED talk and said, do not ask me where I am from, because I’m coming from so many places. And don’t essentialize that just because I was born in Uganda, therefore, Uganda is my home. Of course it is home, but also is Belgium where I spent seven years. So is Duke where I spent 12 years among the Methodists.
So don’t ask me where I am from, she says, ask me, where am I local? Where do I participate in the local politics, in the local conversation of what is important to this place? What makes meaning to this place? What makes community in this place? So at any given time, you find that the sense of home in a way here is committed consistent to the places where you find yourself actively participating in those local forms of life that are trying to build the community to build life to contribute meaningfully to a project.
And then you discover that actually, even though Todd comes from a totally different place, there is so much that actually we share together that maybe that’s the fellowship that you are referring to, you’ll find these unlikely friendships that you didn’t even know existed. That sustained me over my migrant existence, if you like and to find a sense of home and place, you know, these different locations, the engagements, the commitments, but also the friendships and the fellowships.
When I was at Duke, for example, as a Catholic priest, this Methodist-founded institution with all the brethren coming from different evangelical churches and things like that. What an incredible communion and community that, that revealed to me, the sense of the Ephesian moment of coming together across divides in a way that Paul praises in the letter to the Ephesians. So my own sense of home is really connected with that.
But it’s also connected with the sense that everywhere one finds oneself, where I find myself, important is giving at that ease that God’s purpose in the world is always to kind of open up to an ever expanding horizon. That within each instantiation of home, within each location of home, there is at the same time, and that sort of office on home, to see these studies at the same time, and Abrahamic invitation to get up and go to a new place.
There is always an ever expanding frontier, horizon. And that, that is how God builds a new people in the world, whose home goes on expanding to these strange new people, tribe, a committed drive for more tribes, races, nationalities, languages. So I’m very much at home in South Bend as I’m in Uganda, but also clearly aware that this is not it, but the kingdom of God is bigger than this.
And, and the invitation to kind of see that these are kind of important, but they are also partly fragments of this new home that God’s incarnation makes in our midst. And so kind of to live within that kind of tension at home, and yet, we are pilgrims, not fully at home. So those are the kind of discipline that I think I try to cultivate and sustain me within these multiple engagements, but also in this place of going back and forth, right now, also connected with the work that I’m doing in Africa,
Todd Ream: Thank you. Can you tell me a little bit more about your calling to the priesthood and your understanding of yourself as a priest, a professor and a pilgrim, and in particular, individuals through whom God worked to lay that calling upon your heart?
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: Maybe three, three moments that I can think about in my own journey. First of all, growing up at home, my parents, migrants, my father was not a Christian. He became a Christian to get married to my mother. My mother was from a traditional family, Catholic family. My father became a Christian. They got married. They moved to Uganda.
And growing up in this evangelical Catholic home with my father, the zeal of a newly converted Christian, my mother with the kind of settled Catholicism of her family, I think that somehow did something to kind of shape a desire for me. I remember my father always taking me to meet the priest, the church and things like that. That was significant.
But also the commitment of my parents early on when we are young, the parish was seven miles away, and every Sunday they would walk to church seven miles. I remember when I was a little boy, I wanted to go with them. I asked them whether I could come. They said, no, you can’t. I begged, please. They said, okay. But just not even a mile, I started crying because it was too much. So they sent me back home. But later on, I realized, wow, seven miles, one way walking. And then seven miles.
Todd Ream: Seven miles back. That’s, that’s what I would do.
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: And they would be gone the whole Sunday, day. But that kind of real love for the faith, I think, shaped a desire in me for the priesthood, I think.
Before I get to the second instance, and then my father died when I was young when I was in grade five, and an immigrant family and a number of people that came to our aid, paid for our tuition, our fees and all that, including, including this teacher. It was in grade 5, teacher, Elias, a Muslim man, who paid for my tuition even into seminary to begin, and he did stand next to my mother at my ordination to present me to the bishop for, for ordination. Isn’t that something? So I think that’s kind of really shaped my sensibility as well.
And then the second incident that I wanted to talk about, again, connected with my upbringing, because we are immigrant families, one of the things that I remember, my parents, even as they settled in, learned the local language, how they always spoke the local language with an accent, spoke with an accent always. I have come to see that as a theological virtue, really. Learning to speak with an accent. Of course, this morning in class, students were asking me, I said, can you repeat that? And I, again, I joked, I said, people think that I speak with an accent. So, everyone was laughing, of course, you know, I speak with an accent.
But to be a Christian is at the same time to be invited to learn to speak with an accent, wherever, wherever we find ourselves. So I think that it’s a moment for me reflecting back, the home that I grew up at my parents.
The third incident that I think shaped my journey through the priesthood is that I joined the seminary two times. The first time I joined, not sure, but just kind of try things out. Then I became sick. I was sick. But when I was in seminary, I was admitted to hospitals, spent over a month in the hospital. After that I went back home, on medication so very, very, very weak and my classmates actually thought that was going to die, but they would come to visit me in the evenings and we’d sit around the hospital bed, laughing and the nurses were so kind. I think to me, that was a very significant time.
So looking back, I feel that’s one of the most decisive experiences because I emerged out of that experience really weak, humbled, but I think my whole vision of life was changed. My desire to become a priest did intensify so much because I could now see that perhaps it is for this that God took care of me. But also the kindness, the gentleness, the love that I received.
I, perhaps as a young man, after my father died, living in a very difficult situations of Idi Amin and violence and war, I think I was really hardening and getting more muscular in my heart and stubborn and angry. I think that experience is what massaged my spirit into a bit of tenderness to kind of even be able to to receive the call.
I don’t know if that had not happened, I don’t know, first of all, whether I would be a priest, but also I don’t know what kind of priest that I would be. All to say, Todd, I’m looking back and I’m grateful to that very painful time, which is, which is kind of strange, but kind of to name it now as one of the most precious gifts that I’ve received, you see.
Yeah, again, I think it kind of plays into the story that we’ve been talking about the story of God’s reconciling love for the world. Yeah, I think that’s a story that I can talk about my journey as you are interested in to find out about my journey, but I don’t think I can understand myself as a priest, without an experience like that.
Todd Ream: I greatly appreciate your willingness to share those details with us and how grace emerged from a difficult situation and called you to the work that you’re doing today in ways that you may not otherwise have absent that experience. Thank you.
I want to ask you about some of your written work now so that professor side but probably never leaving aside the priest and the pilgrim because those seem to be evident in terms of the books that you’ve written of which there are 10. Your first book, Beyond Universal Reason, the relation between Ethics and Religion in the Work of Stanley Hauerwas was published by University of Notre Dame Press in 2000. And your most recent book, Who Are My People? Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, it was also published by University of Notre Dame Press, but this one in 2022.
You mentioned your book with Chris Rice also that you’ve done, but when you look at the arc of your published work over the course of the last quarter century, how do you come to understand the ways that it’s developed and the ways in which you’ve been given opportunities to share this theme of reconciliation with people?
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: I feel humbled when you mentioned the books that are, that, that, that, that I’ve written. What a surprise again that somebody who has grown up, grew up in a house without books would come to write this many books. But also realizing that the writing of a book, I think, is a conversation in time. It’s what’s going on around a particular time that kind of elicits a book. So it’s kind of really answering specific questions of the time.
Beyond Universal Reason grew out of my dissertation and then it turned into a book. And along the way, other opportunities offered me a chance to reflect on what is going on. Even though in Beyond Universal Reason in The Future for Africa, these earlier books, I’m not invoking or using the notion of reconciliation explicitly. The language of reconciliation is not there. Now I look back, I see, it is the same overarching concern that has been driving my scholarship. And that overriding concern has to do in the endless cycles of violence, of war, of corruption around the world, especially in Africa. Endless cycles of genocide and governance. What difference does Christianity make? Does Christianity make any difference?
And of course people kind of, we found a case like Rwanda. Oh yeah, this was a Christian nation. Christianity simply radiated that violence, increased that violence. But I’m concerned if God’s love is reconciling the world, where can you see it? What does that difference look like? Now, as I look back, I see all my books in a way have been an attempt to answer that question, including that first book where it’s kind of dealing with the philosophical issues around story and things like that.
So that I think has been a constant up to now. I’m trying to kind of locate the Christian difference in a world that is captured by an imagination of war and violence and power and self-aggrandizement. Is this what also Christianity is doing in the world or does Christianity provide a different imagination of who we are, of how the Word looks? And that that Word actually is also real. So that’s what I’ve been really getting at trying to narrate that difference, locate it in the world, and display it in its many manifestations.
And so my recent book, Who Are My People? On Love and Violence, I had originally entitled the book, The Invention of Love. How love, it sort of invents a new future. And the stories that I engage in so forth kind of really displaying how the various forms of that inventions in the midst of so much that is vital.
So I think that has been a kind of constant theme through my books. How to do it, how I’ve done it again depends on the opportunity for the particular book, but also the particular question that are being raised that I try to get to in the different books.
Todd Ream: Staying with that theme of the professor, but also recognizing that priest and pilgrim are never far away, if anything, they’re, they’re right there with that, I want to ask you about how you understand the Christian academic vocation, and in particular, what characteristics or qualities do you think are important for someone who embraces this vocation and how do you understand it?
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: What two things I can say, Todd, one, it has to be a very personal journey. Me, Emmanuel Katongole, I have to be able to narrate my academic work, my scholarship within the trajectory of my biography, within the vocation that it is a calling, definitely.
But to be able to narrate it within one whose journey is very, very important. How did I become the kind of academic that I am? How did you, Todd, become the kind of academic that you are? And it has to kind of fit within how you understand the word, but also the gifts that have been given, the sense of fitness, how you have been fitted for the kind of work that you do.
So it’s like, I think, a personal journey. It calls for a personal narration. But I think every Christian academic scholar needs to engage that autobiographical account. So how did you become the kind of scholar that you are? What are you contributing? How do you see yourself within the broader academic enterprise? So that’s one, one way to get to that question.
But the second way to get the question is also to, to realize that this vocation, the academic vocation, it’s not the it. It is a ministry. It goes, again, for the bigger story within which it is located. The grace that I received from around 2004 for me to discover this overarching story of reconciliation, God reconciling the world, was also a gift.
Oh, so if that is the story, if that is what is going on, that means everything, the whole world, the cosmos, everything, including academic scholarship, is located within the bigger story of God’s reconciling love. It is in view of that. That is where one receives a gift, but also one becomes an ambassador.
So, if I am invited to be part of the scholarly, academic world and so forth, that’s not it. The it is, again, to advance, to tell that story of God’s reconciling them. For me, it was very, very fortunate that I was able to discover the sense of vocation located within that story. But I think that’s very important. Otherwise, we in the academy might take ourselves too seriously. And you know, the battles that are in the academy, the infighting and things like that, as somebody said, because the spoils are so little.
But if we don’t look at ourselves within the broader story, toward what, why does it matter to specialize in these realities, to specialize, for example, molecular biology, or whatever that specialization is as a Christian scholar. It is in the view, but located within a broader story of God reconciling. I feel that that’s, that’s, very important to locate, the academic world, the academy within the story within which it fits. Otherwise, we think that the academy is so important, for its own self, it’s for tenure but that is not important. That’s not interesting in my opinion.
So I think discovering this with this overarching story is so important that we can not only get the humility that is needed for the academy but also the resources and the energy and and the excitement to be part of a bigger drama than ourselves.
I think what we see increasingly more and more, especially in the development of modern academy, the academy almost becomes a kind of church hoarding for our loyalty and allegiance. But the promise it offers cannot be substituted for this reconciling work of God in the love of the salvation. The academy cannot save us. So I think locating it within the story of which it is part, I think, for me, is very important. I think that’s why it makes all the difference. At least in my case, that’s what has made a difference about my scholarship.
Discovering that actually not only discovered a kind of purpose, telos, but also re-energized my own academic engagement. But also broadened it because now I could see that there is far much more at stake that I could not kind of satisfy myself by writing a very highly sophisticated book that can only be read by 10 people, fellow academics. That would no longer satisfy for the purpose for which God has placed me in this role.
But it also means that as a scholar, I need to do the academic work, the disciplined inquiry. That is important because the extreme on the other side is for the practitioners to, to think that, oh, we are the people doing the work, those people in the academics are just kind of lounging around the—slackers or whatever. So we went to one conference, somebody was saying, oh, we are going to this interesting conference over, the good thing, maybe not theologians there. We just be. Yeah, to kind of feel that this word of practice is also kind of self-sufficient and things like that.
No, the gifts of disciplined inquiry are so needed, so important. The gifts of expertise are so needed to understand the inner workings of the world, the inner workings of the different fields of science. That is so much needed to open that up, but also to kind of share it as much as we can with a broad enough audience.
So that’s, that’s how I see the kind of relationship between the academy and, and the world and the Church, that keeps reminding us of the Church’s role, and keeps reminding us of what the story, the big story is all about. And to draw us, not so much to point to ourselves, but to point to that beyond that is God’s story of reconciling the whole world to God’s self.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As we prepare to close our conversation then, in what ways do you think that the university and the Church can be brought into a relationship where they can be of greater service to one another in the years to come?
Fr. Emmanuel Katongole: It is a service to the world. It’s about God reconciling the whole world. It’s about serving the world. It’s about redeeming the world, the broken world, the world of poverty, the world of violence. And that increasingly also requires us to move beyond the neat walls of the academy, into the murky realities of practice.
For me, what that has meant that following this journey is what has led me now back to Uganda, actually, to Bethany Land Institute, working with the poor in the poor communities, addressing the challenges of food, of environmental degradation, of poverty, in a way that I’m not only bringing gifts from the academy, but also learning the grassroots level, what is going on and bringing those stories back in a way and say, hey, this is what it means actually. So again, opening up those doors, those gaps and so forth.
So more and more the Church, the academy pushes us into the world in order to learn what is going on, not to be involved there, but also to kind of bring that back into the Church. That’s the kind of conversation at least for me, this journey of reconciliation has taken me. And I’m beginning to see that it is a similar journey into which we are all called.
Again, depending on where you are and what you’re doing. But I think that movement seems to be so important and needed. First of all, to locate ourselves within a broader story, but also to realize that that story is not just kind of inward looking, but it is for the reconciliation of the whole world.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Father Emmanuel Katongole, Professor of Theology and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
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Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
