“Christopher Tounsel makes a major contribution to the study of South Sudanese political thought. He has drawn on the literature of Black liberation theology in Africa as well as the Americas, giving the South Sudanese a place in the theoretical literature that has excluded them up to now. Chosen Peoples presents unique material that has the potential to shift the way we understand the history of Sudan and South Sudan and the role of religion in politics more generally.”
~Douglas H. Johnson, author of, South Sudan: A New History for a New Nation
“Chosen Peoples is a remarkable achievement, revealing unexplored chapters of South Sudanese history and placing them into a novel analytic frame that will impact how we think about postcolonial liberation for many years to come. In this brave book, Christopher Tounsel does not shy away from asking difficult questions of his material, the reward being that he opens considerable space for thinking anew about the mutual construction of race and religion in the two Sudans and beyond.”
~Noah Salomon, author of, For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State
"In a study that will resonate with anyone familiar with the political language of medieval Christian Europe or the 19th-century United States, Tounsel shows how biblical and religious language utterly permeated political rhetoric and self-fashioning in South Sudan. . . . Chosen Peoples is richly instructive for understanding the influence of the Bible in societies where it represents a powerful and challenging new presence."
~Philip Jenkins, Christian Century
"Tounsel helps to draw new attention to South Sudan. He unpacks the influence of Christianity on the politics of identity in the country. Rather than providing a comprehensive history of the political and social influences of Christian churches in South Sudan, Tounsel focuses on specific institutions at different points in history that highlight the diverse ways in which Christianity shaped South Sudanese identities."
~Timothy Longman, Sociology of Religion
"[Chosen Peoples] is an important text that touches on a new moment in the development of African Christian political thought—a moment when Black Africans drew from discourses of liberation theology to fight for liberation from other Black Africans."
~David Ngong, Reading Religion
"An important contribution to scholarship . . . Chosen Peoples offers critical insight into the complex ways in which categories of religion, race and ethnicity work in different contexts, and also raises serious questions about the limitations of Christianity - and possibly religion more generally - as a basis of nation building and as a means of promoting national cohesion and collective identity."
~Adriaan van Klinken, Religion
