Month: January 2019

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The Remarkable Religious Leaders Who Brought Peace to Northern Uganda

One of the nastiest armed conflicts in recent times was the war in Northern Uganda that lasted from 1987 to 2009, fought between the forces of the cultish Lord’s Resistance Army and the army of the Government of Uganda. Many remember the Kony 2012 video, which brought attention to the conflict and garnered over 100 millions hits on the internet. Beginning in the late 1990’s, a peace process was initiated by the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (ARLPI), a groups of religious leaders, Catholic, Protestant (including Pentecostal), and Muslim, that pioneered peace negotiations, lobbied for the Amnesty Act of 2000, which allowed thousands of child soldiers to leave the bush, and encouraged Ugandans across the region to practice forgiveness.

I was reminded of the initiative by this recent article in Commonweal, which recounts the work of the ARLPI. I was involved in documenting these efforts myself from 2012 to 2015, when I oversaw the production of a video, “Uganda: The Challenge of Forgiveness,” and conducted a research project, “Forgiveness: Unveiling an Asset for Peacebuilding,” studying dynamics of forgiveness after conflict in Uganda, whose results are here. One of the stars is Archbishop John Baptist Odama, who chaired the ARLPI and traveled through the bush to spark peace negotiations with Joseph Kony.

 

 

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Lamin Sanneh, RIP

Lamin Sanneh, one of my intellectual heroes, has just died at age 76. He was D. Willis James professor of missions and world Christianity at Yale Divinity School and a professor of history at Yale University, and a superb scholar of global Christianity, Christian-Muslim relations, and religion in Western Africa. His most recent book,  “Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition in West African Islam”(2016), was pivotal to my understanding of Islam in Western Africa, particularly its capacity for peace and interreligious harmony.

This obituary in the New York Times tells his life history well.

It begins thus:

Lamin Sanneh, who was born into poverty in a tiny river town in Gambia and became a world-renowned scholar of Christianity and Islam, providing key insights into how each religion took hold in West Africa, died on Jan. 6 in New Haven. He was 76.

His son, Kelefa, said the cause was complications of a stroke.

Dr. Sanneh was born a Muslim but converted to Christianity as a teenager and became a practicing Roman Catholic, giving him experience in both Islam and Christianity and an unusual perspective for a scholar of religion.

Even more striking, he alone of his large rural family managed to migrate across continents and attend prominent universities. He ended up as a professor at Yale University, where he taught for 30 years. He was the D. Willis James professor of missions and world Christianity at Yale Divinity School and a professor of history at Yale.

His memoir, “Summoned From the Margin: Homecoming of an African”(2012), relates how, even as a youth, he was consumed with theological questions about the nature of God and human suffering; that passion led to his religious conversion and academic career.

One of the themes of Sanneh’s work is that Christianity spread to Africa not as a front for colonialism but through its capacity to adapt to African cultures – and a cultures.

Sanneh was endlessly inquisitive:

Dr. Sanneh was on an endless quest for knowledge. “He always described himself as a thorn in the side of his teachers and imams and professors — he just had so many questions,” his daughter, Sia Sanneh, said, and he was grateful for mentors who encouraged his curiosity. “He wasn’t from a place where you questioned doctrines and teachings.”

May he rest in peace.

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The Surprise of Reconciliation

A surprising development in Catholic social thought in recent years has been a teaching of reconciliation as a principle for societies. Global events including ethnic and religious conflict, transitions from war and dictatorship, and persistent legacies of historical injustices like slavery and abuses of indigenous peoples have given urgency to efforts to help people to live together peaceably, both because it is valuable in itself and because it makes democracy and social peace sustainable. Catholics have sought to tap their tradition for historical cases and teachings. Reconciliation, of course, is not hard to locate in the tradition — it is what God accomplished through Jesus Christ, the very center an locus of the faith. Yet, applying this event — and its accompanying virtues of mercy, forgiveness, solidarity, and the like — in social contexts is not obvious and requires some excavation in the tradition.

This new volume, edited by J.J. Carney at Creighton University, and Laurie Johnston at Emmanuel College, aims at this retrieval, finding cases from history and contemporary times that help us to see what reconciliation can look like and offering ethical analysis as well.

Here is the description:

This collection of original essays written expressly for this volume comes out of retreats and meetings on the subject of Catholic social reconciliation. How have ecclesial, liturgical, and ritual resources contributed to peacebuilding during and after socio-political conflicts? The historical periods examined start with the patristic era and go up to such modern events as the troubles in Northern Ireland, restorative justice in U.S. prisons, resistance to the shining path violence in twentieth-century Peru, and reconciliation in Eastern Africa.

Multiple Catholic scholars contribute chapters. Mine own looks at the role of forgiveness in Catholic social thought and in the case of Uganda following its civil war involving the Lord’s Resistance Army. It shows, among other things, that Ugandans forgave one another to a high degree and did so on the basis of their Christian faith — the surprise of reconciliation.

And here are more details on the book.