The Gerber Institute is very happy to announce that the speaker for the inaugural Bishop Gerber Distinguished Lecture will be Emmanuel Katongole. The lecture will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 in the Dugan-Gorges Conference Center on the campus of Newman University. The title of Professor Katongole’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be “Reconciliation: A Fresh Gift and Vision of Hope in a Broken World.”

Born in the village of Malube, Uganda, and educated in the country, Fr. Katongole was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest by the Kampala Archdiocese in 1987. Since his ordination, he has served parishes in Africa, Belgium, and the United States.

Professor Katongole is a founding co-director and Senior Strategist of the Center for Reconciliation at the Duke Divinity School—a center whose mission is to inspire, form, and support leaders, communities, and congregations to think, feel, and live as ambassadors of reconciliation in a broken world. Katongole’s teaching and research interests cover a wide range of issues related to global Christianity, more specifically to the interconnections between Christianity, politics and violence in Africa. He examines the role of stories in the formation of political identity, the dynamics of social memory, and the nature and role of Christian imagination.

His published works include Beyond Universal Reason; The Relation Between Religion and Ethics in the Work of Stanley Hauerwas (Notre Dame Press, 2000), African Theology Today (Scranton Press, 2002), A Future for Africa (University of Scranton Press, 2005), and more recently, The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theory for Africa (Eerdman’s, 2011).