Synopses & Reviews
For over five hundred years, since the great age of exploration, Western Christians have visited, traded with, conquered and colonized large parts of the non-Western world. In virtually every case this contact has been accompanied by an attempt to spread Christianity.
This volume explores the manner in which Western missionary Christianity has been shaped and transformed through contact with the peoples of Peru, Mexico, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China, and Japan. Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity demonstrates how local populations, who initially encountered Christianity as a mixture of religion, culture, politics, ethics and technology, selected those elements they felt suited their needs. The conversion of the local population, the volume shows, was usually accompanied by a significant indigenization of Christianity. Through the detailed examination and comparison of events in a range of countries and cultures, this book points provides a deeper understanding of mission history and the dynamics of Christianity's expansion. The encounter with Western Christianity is vital to the history of contact between Western and non-Western civilizations. Western Christians have visited, traded with, conquered and colonized large parts of the non-Western world for over five hundred years, and their migration has almost always been accompanied by an attempt to create new Christians in new lands. Just as indigenous people have been converted however, so too has Christianity become variously indigenized. Local populations initially encounter a Christian package of religion, culture, politics, ethics and technology. This volume illustrates the ways in which peoples have selected elements of this package to suit their specific needs, and so explores the myriad transformations missionary Christianity has undergone through contact with the peoples of Peru, Mexico, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and Japan. Contributing are Erik Cohen (University of Jerusalem), Yochanan Bar Yafe Szeminski ?, John F. Howes ?, D. Dennis Hudson ?, Daniel H. Bays (University of Kansas), and Eric Van Young (University of California, San Diego). The chapters are linked by their attempt to overcome conventional regional and disciplinary barriers in order to achieve a deeper understanding of mission history and the dynamics of the expansion of Christianity. A remarkable work, this volume will pave the way for entirely new approaches to a particularly complex and demanding subject.
Synopsis
"A brilliant . . . analysis of the fragile hegemony and identities of colonial Virginia's elite men. . . .
On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage compellingly illuminates the ragged edge where masculinity and colonial identity meet. . . . [the book] will undoubtedly send Jefferson scholars scurrying back to their notes. . . . Most significant, by being among the first to tackle the subject of masculinity in early America, Lockridge forces colonial scholars to reexamine the lives of men they thought they already knew too well."
William and Mary Quarterly
Two of the greatest of Virginia gentlemen, William Byrd II and Thomas Jefferson, each kept a commonplace book--in effect, a journal where men were to collect wisdom in the form of anecdotes and quotations from their readings with a sense of detachment and scholarship. Writing in these books, each assembled a prolonged series of observations laden with fear and hatred of women. Combining ignorance with myth and misogyny, Byrd's and Jefferson's books reveal their deep ambivalence about women, telling of women's lascivious nature and The Female Creed and invoking the fallible, repulsive, and implicitly corruptible female body as a central metaphor for all tales of social and political corruption.
Were these private outbursts meaningless and isolated incidents, attributable primarily to individual pathology, or are they written revelations of the forces working on these men to maintain patriarchal control? Their hatred for women draws upon a kind of misogynistic reserve found in the continental and English intellectual traditions, but it also twists and recontextualizes less misogynistic excerpts to intensified effect. From this interplay of intellectual traditions and the circumstances of each man's life and later behavior arises the possibility one or more specific politics of misogyny is at work here.
Kenneth Lockridge's work, replete with excerpts from the books themselves, leads us through these texts, exploring the structures, contexts, and significance of these writings in the wider historical context of gender and power. His book convincingly illustrates the ferocity of early American patriarchal rage; its various meanings, however suggestively explored here, must remain contestable.
About the Author
Steven Kaplanis Associate Professor in Comparative Religion and African Studies and Chair of the African Studies Department at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is author of The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia and co-author, with Dr. Ruth Westheimer, of Surviving Salvation: The Ethiopian Jewish Family in Transition.
Table of Contents
The Africanization of missionary christianity: history and typology / Steven Kaplan -- Christianization and indigenization: contrasting processes of religious adaptation in Thailand / Erik Cohen -- From Inca gods to Spanish saints and demons / Jan Szemiânski -- Japanese Christianity and the state: from Jesuit confrontation/competition to Uchimura's noninstitutional movement/Protestantism / John F. Howes -- Tamil Hindu responses to Protestants: nineteenth-century literati in Jaffna and Tinnevelly / D. Dennis Hudson --