Building an Ecology of Resilience through Religious Practice and Community in Northern Uganda

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork from 2015 to 2019, this paper explores resilience among evangelical Christians in rural northern Uganda after years of violent conflict. The paper argues that three aspects of evangelical life train and build resilience for congregation members: (1) individual and collective prayer; (2) social inclusion and resource sharing; (3) narrative practices of reframing the past and present. When these are continuously practiced within the evangelical group, these features form a kind of resilience which acts to manage the effects of violence. Thus, resilience is conceptualized as an adaptive process within an ecology of social and narrative practice.