Imitating Christ in Magwi

Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology achieves two things. First, focusing on indigenous Roman Catholics in northern Uganda and South Sudan, it is a detailed ethnography of how a community sustains hope in the midst of one of the most brutal wars in recent memory - that between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. Second, it puts out a call for theology itself to be a practice of imitating Christ. Such practice requires both living among people on the far margins of society and articulating a theology that foregrounds the daily, if extraordinary, lives of people.Todd D. Whitmore argues that ethnography is not merely an add-on to theological concepts, but rather a new way of doing theology, and includes what anthropologists call “thick description” of lives of faith. Whitmore’s “anthropological theology” calls not upon abstract concepts but instead is consonant with the fact that God did indeed become human. Whitmore consequently finds that the belief that the spirit of Jesus Christ can enter into a person, through such devotions as the Adoration of the Eucharist, gave people the wherewithal to carry out striking works of mercy during the conflict, and, like Jesus of Nazareth, to risk their lives in the process.