Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing (Resources for Reconciliation) - Softcover

Katongole, Emmanuel; Rice, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0830834516 ISBN 13: 9780830834518

Publisher: IVP, 2008

Synopsis

Christianity Today Book Award winner

Our world is broken and cries out for reconciliation.

But mere conflict resolution and peacemaking are not enough. What makes real reconciliation possible? How is it that some people are able to forgive the most horrendous of evils? And what role does God play in these stories? Does reconciliation make any sense apart from the biblical story of redemption?

Secular models of peacemaking are insufficient. And the church has not always fulfilled its call to be agents of reconciliation in the world. In Reconciling All Things Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice, codirectors of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School, cast a comprehensive vision for reconciliation that is biblical, transformative, holistic and global. They draw on the resources of the Christian story, including their own individual experiences in Uganda and Mississippi, to bring solid, theological reflection to bear on the work of reconciling individuals, groups and societies. They recover distinctively Christian practices that will help the church be both a sign and an agent of God's reconciling love in the fragmented world of the twenty-first century.

This powerful, concise book lays the philosophical foundations for reconciliation and explores what it means to pursue hope in areas of brokenness in theory and practice.

About this title

About the Authors

Emmanuel Katongole (Ph.D., Catholic University of Louvain) is associate research professor of theology and world Christianity at Duke Divinity School. He is the author and editor of several books, including A Future for Africa and African Theology Today.

Chris Rice (M.Div., Duke Divinity School) spent many years living and working in Jackson, Mississippi, with Voice of Calvary Ministries. He is the author of Grace Matters and coauthor (with Spencer Perkins) of More Than Equals. Together Katongole and Rice are the founding codirectors of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School.

Reviews

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, codirectors 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. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: IVP
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0830834516
• ISBN 13: 9780830834518
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 167