Christian Knowledge Research Articles

Hans Sloane, the reinvention of the museum, and the promotion of Christian knowledge

Hans Sloane, the reinvention of the museum, and the promotion of Christian knowledge

Gender, Feeling and the Making of Korean Christian Knowledge in Sengoku Japan*

This essay explores the production of Korean Christian knowledge in Sengoku Japan by analysing narratives about a vision said to have been experienced by an evangelised Korean woman, which circulated within Jesuit correspondence from Japan and in subsequent publications. These texts, about a convert's journey to diverse netherworlds, made affective experiences central to spiritual perception, and to Jesuit interpretation of faith. They held important implications for how women living in a society permeated by Buddhist beliefs and practices could be represented as producers of Christian knowledge and as faith guides to others, whose bodies did not hinder spiritual perception but rather offered tools for achieving it.

The limits of rational knowledge of God according to Joseph Ratzinger

Joseph Ratzinger’s theological thought is distinguished by the conviction that the Christian knowledge of God is closely associated with the concept of the Logos. Therefore, in his reflection, Joseph Ratzinger is a theologian who seeks to render the mystery of God in positive terms. Yet, it would be a mistake to leave this statement without adding that in the rational knowledge of God, theology should at the same time confront what constitutes the limit of rational knowledge. The aim of this article is therefore to provide an overview of how Joseph Ratzinger pointed to the limits of the rational knowledge of God. A two-step method was adopted to achieve this goal. With reference to the synthetic approach, it first accounts for the place that the question of the rational knowledge of God takes in J. Ratzinger’s theological reflection; then it points out how, according to the German theologian, we should understand the apophatic dimension of all theological knowledge; namely, that God, being the infinite Love, can only be known in aspects, and only in the attitude of surrender. In the next step, the most significant aspects of Joseph Ratzinger’s theological reflection on theological knowledge were selected. The analysis of representative texts demonstrates how the German theologian understands limits in the rational knowledge of God. Thus, the understanding of rationality closed to the knowledge of God was presented first, along with the requirements that reason has to meet in order to open itself to the knowledge of God. Then it was demonstrated which of the most important areas of J. Ratzinger’s theological reflection refer to the limits of rational knowledge, and how they do it. The article concerns the limits of knowledge determined by the Revelation, the mystery of God, and the personal centre of Revelation – Christ, as well as the ecclesiastical nature of the creed.

PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE STRUCTURE OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE

The structural abstract discusses the features of modern post-non-classical scientific discourse, according to which all kinds of scientific and religious knowledge are simplified mental construction of a complex objective reality. All accumulated religious knowledge is a combination of various theoretical models of divine reality, the performance of which was checked by centuries of experience of mystical connection with the Lord. According to the requirements of scientific and religious discourse on incompleteness of knowledge, all religious texts of the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, etc. are not carriers of absolutely probable knowledge. The sacred reality they describe is far more complex. The structural abstract reveals the originality of the subject and object of religious narration and the special nature of the mystical fact. The empirical basis of Christian knowledge is the books of the Old and New Testaments, which set the initial basis of Christian knowledge. The array of interpretations of sacred knowledge, accumulated over two thousand years of the Christianity development, it constitutes the main volume in the system of Christian knowledge. Christian theology provides a comprehensive understanding of Christian doctrine and its historical development. A special role is played by mystical knowledge-management-experiencing, the knowledge of God in the structure of Christian knowledge. The peculiarity of knowledgemanagement-experiencing determines that it comes directly from God. Theology can be achieved in the course of many years of practical work of an ascetic. The mystical side of knowledge-management is the experience of a direct connection with the Lord, which is difficult to convey in words. Secret knowledge-management exists only in real time in the existential reality of sacred experience. The structural abstract distinguishes two types of metaphysical knowledge – Western and Eastern metaphysics. Western metaphysics is considered to be the universal, most developed type of philosophical rational knowledge, the main goal of which is to develop a theoretical model of the fundamental reality, what is the God. It is reasonable to call Eastern metaphysics the metaphysics of the Path originating in the middle of the first millennium BC in India (Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.) and China (Taoism). Orthodoxy is the Christian version of the metaphysics of the Path, while Sufism is in Islam. Everything is subordinated to the liberation of the ascetic from worldly desires and the achievement of a mystical connection with God in Eastern metaphysics. The metaphysics of the Path includes three components – theoretical construction of the God, difficult practical actions (the Path) and the secret knowledge-management of the God, which are considered in inseparable unity. The Orthodox version of the metaphysics of the Path is one of the most developed in Eastern metaphysics.The texts of Western and Eastern metaphysics differ considerably. The works of Western metaphysicians appeal to the human mind and are predominantly speculative. The writings of Eastern metaphysicians try to reproduce the mental reality of the Path of merit of Enlightenment to a large extent. If rational knowledge of the fundamental foundations of the universe prevails in Western metaphysics, then Orthodox metaphysics is guided by the desire to enter the mystical space of divine reality.

The Mystical Narrative as a Way of Revealing the Truth of Faith

The biblical understanding of faith shows that it is a phenomenon inherently connected with the perception and experience of God‘s presence and action in human history. Revelation is considered the foundation of faith, as recorded by both testaments: from the words or personal stories of the patriarchs and the prophets to the stories of the Gospel and the witness of Christ‘s followers. The act of faith expects that the individual or the nation will fully embrace Revelation, doing so in devotion and trust. Reflecting on the relationship between religion and faith, this study will primarily draw upon the paradigm of Christian knowledge and, especially, – utilizing the method of literary interpretation with interdisciplinary overlaps – from the mystical experiences of selected medieval authors (such as Margherita de Cortona, Angela da Foligno, and Chiara da Montefalco). This is because the mystical experience mirrors a multitude of attributes that accompany the act of faith. And even though the mystical experience is due to its mysterious character fundamentally inexpressible, it remains an original source of revealing the processes of the human being‘s spiritual maturation.

POETHOLOGY OF "HOLY WATER" MOTIVES IN LEGENDS

In this article, the motif of sacred water sources, widespread in folklore, is taken as the main object, and first of all, the events related to water from the cosmogonic myths are considered. At the same time, the significance of water in Islam was compared with the characteristics of the Buddha and Christian knowledge. In the Ancient worldview, creation was associated with various objects related to water. Water is the most common natural creature in mythology. The world ocean, bottomless and infinitely deep water is a phenomenon that existed before the appearance of the first being. Natural spontaneity stands at the origins of all creation, as well as one boundary in the transition from chaos to the cosmos. In mythical knowledge, the concepts of the sea, ocean, river, lake, stream, and sources are very important. One of the important features of the veneration of water as a sacred object is the motives associated with springs or sacred wells. In the knowledge of the peoples of Turkic origin, water is a symbol of creative origin, reproduction, abundance and fertility, destruction and rebirth, virtue, and Kie. The article compared the rituals common to the Turkic peoples related to water: the consecration of water, the opening of spring, the expansion of the streambed, and the invitation of rain. The sources of myths about the origin of water in the knowledge of the ancient Turks are analyzed, and the mythical motifs associated with water are systematized. Samples of folklore about the origin of a stream, river, lake, or sea were considered. The role of prophets and saints in the origin of rivers and springs was highlighted by examples in religious rituals. Three types of holy water mentioned in the Quran are analyzed, and their special function for the human race. The concepts of "holy water", "Holy spring", "living water", and "water of life" were taken into account, and examples were given. "The sacred places of the water and the legends concerning people with special sacred, mysterious power, prophets were compared. Examples from the lyrics of songs common to the Turkic peoples are studied, and appropriate conclusions are drawn.

Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918 by Bill Bell

Reviewed by: Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918 by Bill Bell Rebecca Nesvet (bio) Bill Bell, Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. xx + 271, $45 hardcover. On September 30, 1848, London Chartist leader William Cuffay was convicted for conspiring to levy war in connection with his part in the Chartist demonstration of April 10th at Kennington Common. He was convicted by a jury that, as he insisted, was not of his peers, and he was duly sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen's Land. A year after his trial, prior to his embarkation, Cuffay received from his Chartist comrades a compact one-volume copy of the poems of Lord Byron, inscribed to him with great admiration. When Cuffay read that book in his Tasmanian cell, he may have been reassured that his comrades thought him a hero, that his cause had been right, and that, like the Byron of the radical papers, he might someday be vindicated. The volume now resides at the People's History Museum in Manchester, England, as a key Chartist relic. It shows that the context of reading makes meaning, especially for readers severed from everything they have known. [End Page 474] What such readers make of their reading is the subject of Bill Bell's Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918, an indispensable study in media history twenty years in the making and well worth the wait. The title refers to Robinson Crusoe's salvaged library, "a cultural carapace for the individual against the tyranny of distance" (2–3). Crusoe's library is the most famous modern iteration of a trope that stretches from depictions of St. Jerome in a great deal of fine art to Thomas Selby Cousins's Australian cowherd in the sentimental picture "The Bushman's Dream," published in the Illustrated Sydney News in 1869. Bell's case studies of "hermeneutic castaways," mostly historical but sometimes fictional, demonstrate the icon once embodied by Jerome "becoming enmeshed in a colonial context" (4). Bell is intrigued by the contents and discernible usage of colonial libraries, which "often go unexamined in accounts of" colonial reading (9). In 1998, Bell coined the term "geography of communications" to articulate, as he puts it in Crusoe's Books, "the means by which discourses travel, proliferate, and are adapted across space" (23). By examining the libraries of a few distinct populations—emigrants to Australia, convicts, Scottish expatriates, and British explorers of the poles—Bell reveals that the nineteenth-century British Empire's "increased mobility … had considerable material, hermeneutic, and cultural consequences for the production of the newly inflected cultures that emerged as a result of the readers' encounters with novel situations" (25). Indeed, imperial reading was ultimately not a "monolithic apparatus for the imposition of ideology" (25). Hermeneutic castaways exhibited considerable agency. Bell's history of castaway hermeneutics engages with major theorists of media studies, literacy history, and travel and imperialist writing, including Walter Benjamin, Alberto Manguel, and Mary Louise Pratt, and joins recent studies such as Priti Joshi's magnificent The Empire News (2021) in exploring the global contours of Victorian periodical culture. Crusoe's Books is also well worth reading for the fine details of exile reading cultures that Bell unearths. For instance, in 1870s Melbourne, Cole's Book Arcade stocked over two million titles, including used books. This wealth of reading material signals the role that books played in colonial Australians' mechanisms of self-definition. Crusoe's Books will also help scholars of Victorian periodical literature to explore a neglected aspect of the March of Intellect. Convict literacy rates improved remarkably on board ships to Australia. The firm Chambers, publisher of Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, developed a prefabricated library kit for this purpose, and organizations such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge were eager to help Britons supply emigrants with giftbooks. Some previously literate convicts, such as [End Page 475] forgers, contributed to the production of exile periodicals. Some castaways rebelled against the institutions that had exiled them. On Spike Island, Young Ireland leader John Mitchel's contributions to the Jail Journal are "full...

The "Spiritualized Devil": Practical Demonology and Protestant Doctrines in Scottish Witchcraft Confessions

Histories of the Devil in the Scottish witch trials have often focused on the confessions of accused witches and have tended to center on notions of practical demonology, that is beliefs about the Devil and witches that surfaced during the interrogation process. But the Devil of practical demonology was only one permutation of wider Christian demonic belief. Drawing on Christina Larner's idea of "the new popular demonic," recent studies of English and German witchcraft confessions, and several overlooked anecdotal narratives in manuscript and printed Scottish witchcraft confessions, this article argues that the doctrines of total depravity and mental temptation extended to the legal environment of the interrogation, and even influenced some accused witches' understanding of the Devil. By exploring Protestant spirituality in accused witches' confessions, this article works to develop a better understanding of how ordinary parishioners expressed orthodox Christian knowledge about the Devil.

‘Essere’ in regime di teologia. Per una breve introduzione all’ontologia medievale

This paper is the brief introduction with which I chaired the medieval session of the Conference on the history of ontology. It proposes some simple and general considerations, which aim to provide an absolutely essential historical-conceptual outline of medieval metaphysical thought, and to express a way of envisaging its unity. My thesis is that medieval ontology is indifferently theological (theocentric) in character, and that one of the tasks of the historian is to understand how an “Aristotelian” metaphysics could have been formed in correspondence with a theological and Christian knowledge, and through what theoretical and conceptual transformations this Aristotelian metaphysics could have constituted the instrument of elaboration and justification of such a knowledge (and its historical evolutions).

Samuel Wesley and the Tory Crisis of Piety, 1685–1720

William Gibson is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History at Oxford Brookes University and a prolific scholar of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English religious history. This study of Samuel Wesley, father of John and Charles, sets him in the context of the tumultuous forty years of what Gibson describes as ‘the long Glorious Revolution’. These years saw the Roman Catholic James II's removal, a first step away from an English Anglican confessional state by granting toleration to Dissenters, a failed attempt to ‘comprehend’ moderate Dissenters in the Church of England, initiatives to improve that Church's pastoral effectiveness and the nation's godliness, and the succession of a German Lutheran king, all against the background of war against France and political unrest at home. They were challenging times for High Church Anglicans like Samuel Wesley senior.Treating Samuel Wesley as a significant figure in his own right, Gibson illustrates how an early eighteenth-century small-town clergyman, apparently far from centres of power, might be caught up in national issues that powerfully impacted on his beliefs and religious practice, his daily and family life, and political allegiances. Gibson's familiarity with the period has enabled him to find new manuscript sources illustrating Wesley's close involvement with these issues, and throwing new light on his well-known difficulties with his Epworth parishioners, his imprisonment for debt, and the vicissitudes of his marriage to Susanna. This helps us to appreciate Wesley in a broader context.Gibson depicts Samuel Wesley's life as a series of crises, for others as well as himself. After discussing why this son and grandson of Dissenters conformed to the Church of England in 1684, he considers the personal complexities for Wesley of the national events of the years 1688–95. His Oxford college, Exeter, was threatened with a Roman Catholic takeover. When ordained deacon in August 1688, his oath of allegiance was to James II, but five months later when ordained priest, he rejected his oath to James in favour of William and Mary, while Susanna, his wife of three months, remained loyal to James. He was dismissed from his curacy, disliked being a naval chaplain, and, with a growing family, was short of money. Aristocratic influence and royal patronage secured his appointment in 1695 as rector of the remote Lincolnshire town of Epworth. He became a reforming incumbent, implementing, in consultation with the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the then leading Anglican ginger group, contemporary strategies to raise moral standards and deepen lay piety. Unfortunately, he alienated many of Epworth's leading residents. Additionally, he was a poor financial manager, and his High Church Tory political sympathies alienated Whig opponents, contributing to his imprisonment for debt, and raised the suspicions of his new Whig-sympathizing bishop, William Wake. However, he had a strong local and national Tory High Church support network, which rallied to handsomely pay his debts. Wesley regretted Wake's eirenic attitude to Dissenters, and lack of support for his initiatives to enforce moral and spiritual discipline in Epworth. Nationally, Wesley emerged briefly as a leading figure in the tumultuous events of Dr Sacheverell's impeachment and the Church's 1710 Convocation, which sought to exclude Dissenters from public life and close their academies and strengthen the Church's spiritual and moral discipline. Alongside this Gibson also explores the vicissitudes of Samuel and Susanna's tempestuous marriage in terms of contemporary understandings of ‘passive obedience’, duty, family government, and rights of conscience, as well as their experience of a poltergeist at the rectory in 1716–17 in the context of contemporary understanding of the supernatural and George I's recent succession.This is an excellent and sympathetic study of Samuel Wesley's High Church world. However, it perhaps oversimplifies the polarity of High Church and Low Church Anglicans and their respective identification with Tories and Whigs. Some Whig bishops, including William Wake, were High Churchmen, if not as high as Samuel Wesley. Gibson himself notes that the leading Whig bishop, Gilbert Burnet, loaned Wesley £100 to assist with his financial embarrassment, and that Wesley commended Burnet's reforming Discourse of the Pastoral Care and the sermons of the leading Dissenter, Richard Baxter.Eleven pertinent contemporary illustrations are included and a short appendix by Peter Forsaith discusses images of Samuel Wesley, including that featured on the book's cover, identified as an unknown artist's portrait of Wesley now in the Wrotham Park Collection. There is also an extensive bibliography and index.

죄는 유전되는가?: 진화와 원죄에 대한 프레드릭 테넌트의 논의

Evolutionary theory questioned Adam’s historicity, his Fall, and the doctrine of original sin. Frederick Tennant was a pioneering theologian who, accepting the achievement of natural science, sought to provide a new explanation for the origin of sin. He found it inappropriate to give a moral judgement on the animal nature of human beings which was the result of the evolutionary process. According to him, committing sin is not the necessary consequence of the corrupted human nature, but sin happens becuase the moral consciousness, which gradually appears in human experience, fails to animal instincts. What Tennant sought was not the destruction of the Christian faith, but the rebuilding of the Christian knowledge in accordance with the modern academic achievement. He emphasised that his theory was not connected with the fundamental contents of the Christian faith, because apart from the question of sin’s origin, the universality of actual sin is the sufficient basis of the gospel of redemption. Tennant’s view reminds that human knowledge of the revelation progresses as that of the world does.

Transmission and Reception of Isaac ibn Sahula’s Kabbalistic Commentary on Two Psalms

Abstract In his largely fabulous Historia eclesiastica, politica, natural y moral published in Valencia in 1610, the Dominican Luis de Urreta offers a brief survey of the riches of the Ethiopian imperial library with great admiration. The universal character of the Emperor’s library ensured that it also contained a good selection of Jewish authors and Hebrew books. Among them one can find two names that are in fact one: Isaac ben Sahula. This article documents how Christian knowledge of this author and of some of his works came about, through which ways it became very much widespread, also examining in passing the false attributions of works or rather ideas that became commonplace, especially between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Finally, it will show that a very large part of his fame derived from a single Hebrew manuscript.

‘Reconstructing babel’: Christian missions and knowledge production in the Middle East, nineteenth-twentieth century

ABSTRACT How was missionary knowledge received and interpreted by scholars and church historians in Europe and Russia? Many late nineteenth and early twentieth-century academics utilised knowledge production from Christian missions, notably by way of scholarly Orientalism. However, the history of this knowledge is also a history of representations: while missionary knowledge helped showcase the cultural and religious traditions of Eastern Christianity, what were the underlying motives and especially the consequences? This article examines the formulation and circulation of Eastern Christian knowledge on either side of the Mediterranean, especially on the basis of Catholic missionary archives and academic productions, the study of which is sometimes rooted in non-Anglophone academic traditions. The aim is to shed light on how knowledge relating to Eastern Christianity was assimilated in Europe, as well as the role missions played in this process, especially from the last third of the nineteenth century, when the institutions and instruments for the circulation of knowledge emerged. Another objective is to address the circulations and transformations of this knowledge on either side of the Mediterranean: collected and developed in major European libraries and universities, it was integrated by the governance structures of churches, but quite often also returned to the space it originated from, where it was reappropriated and gave rise to patrimonial processes, notably alongside the sometimes tragic experiences of certain communities during the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of new states. Christian missions, at the intersection of East and West, were at the heart of this dynamic .

Rivers, Isabel. Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800.

Rivers, Isabel. <i>Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800</i>.

Knowledge of God in St Gregory Palamas

The topic of knowledge of God is one of the most important questions discussed by St Gregory Palamas in the majority of his works. Palamas distinguishes four basic types of knowledge of God: knowledge of God drawn from creation, Christian knowledge gained from Scripture and Tradition, mystical knowledge understood as true wisdom, and the deifying vision of the Light of Tabor, which is called knowledge only in an improper sense of this word. All the above types of cognition concerning God are deeply embedded in the whole of Palamite theology, being linked to ideas such as objective distinction between God’s essence and energy or teaching about deification through participation in divine grace.

Christian Bioethics and the Partisan Commitments of Secular Bioethicists: Epistemic Injustice, Moral Distress, Civil Disobedience

Abstract Secular bioethicists do not speak from a place of distinction, but from within particular culturally, socially, and historically conditioned standpoints. As partisans of moral and ideological agendas, they bring their own biases, prejudices, and worldviews to their roles as ethical consultants, social advocates, and academics, attempting rhetorically to sway others and shift policy to a preferred point of view. Their pronouncements represent just one voice among others, even when delivered with strident rhetoric, in an educated and knowing tone, from within institutional positions of power. This essay argues that, given the hegemony of progressive secular bioethics, traditional Christians routinely face epistemic injustice within medicine. That is, Christian knowledge regarding moral reality is all too often demeaned or dismissed, unless such norms can be translated into and defended within a secular ethos. Given such systemic bias, I argue, Christians also experience significant moral distress: they are fully aware of their moral obligations and what they ought to do, but institutionalized power structures make it nearly impossible to so act. But, Christian physicians are not mere technicians, obliged to provide whatever patients request from the list of legally available treatments. That antireligious critics seek to remove the rights of Christian physicians to limit how they practice medicine, where they do not offer or refer for abortion, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, and other inappropriate forms of care, is unjustified and prejudicial, singling out Christians, and other religious groups, for singular treatment. Regardless of what the law requires or institutional policy demands, however, Christians are obliged to submit to God in all things. As a result, they may at times find themselves required to engage in acts of civil disobedience.

An Ethiopian Scholar in Tridentine Rome: Täsfa Ṣeyon and the Birth of Orientalism

AbstractThis article surveys the diasporic life and legacy of the Ethiopian ecclesiastic Täsfa Ṣeyon. After examining his origins in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and the circumstances of his arrival in mid-sixteenth-century Rome, the article outlines his contributions to the evolving Latin Catholic understanding of Ethiopia. Täsfa Ṣeyon was a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent adviser to European humanist scholars and Church authorities concerned with orientalistphilologia sacraas it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. As such, he was a key extra-European agent in the Tridentine project of Ethiopianist and Eastern Christian knowledge production. The article also surveys the complex modern legacy of Täsfa Ṣeyon's career, documenting his posthumous influence in the fields of Ethiopianist Semitic studies and Ethiopian vernacular historiography.

The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill by Robyn Wrigley-Carr

Reviewed by: The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill by Robyn Wrigley-Carr Kathleen Henderson Staudt (bio) The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill. By Robyn Wrigley-Carr. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2020. 185 pp. $15.00 pbk. / $13.49 eb. "Goodness and Love are caught, not taught," reflects Evelyn Underhill in an early retreat. Robyn Wrigley-Carr, a scholar of Christian Spirituality and practicing spiritual director, demonstrates the deep truth of these words in her compact [End Page 161] and abundantly annotated study of Evelyn Underhill's spiritual formation under the guidance of Baron Friedrich von Hugel, demonstrating how this formation is manifest in Underhill's pioneering work as a spiritual guide and retreat leader in the 1920s and 30s. Though plentiful scholarship on both figures already exists, this book is unique in offering personal portraits of von Hugel and Underhill in relationship to one another. The chapter on von Hugel (known affectionately as "the Baron") begins with an accessible portrait of the Baron himself, from his role in the Catholic Modernist movement to his published writing on spirituality. It notes especially his monumental exploration of Catherine of Genoa as exemplifying the "mystical element" in Christianity and shows how he draws on Catherine's wisdom in his work with directees. Von Hugel's emphasis on balance between the intellectual, institutional, and mystical elements of religion is threaded through his work, and Wrigley-Carr gives a welcome reminder of the value of this balanced approach to spiritual formation. It becomes particularly significant in the Baron's work with Evelyn Underhill, whom he gently encouraged away from a broadly transcendental and theocentric spirituality toward a balanced and "ordinary" approach to the spiritual life, rooted in an incarnational, mystical, and Christocentric spirituality. These themes would become signatures for Underhill, especially in her later retreat work. Most compelling is Wrigley-Carr's account of the correspondence and visits that helped to form both von Hugel and his directee. Readers enter this friendship gradually, with a biographical chapter on von Hugel followed by one on Underhill. These chapters appreciate the ardent and original personalities of these two people. Wrigley-Carr then brings the two together in a third chapter that explores how this relationship formed Underhill herself . The Baron provided her with biannual letters of direction that she was instructed to reread monthly. Because they lived near one another, the two had occasional social visits in between his letters. However, the spiritual direction conversation took place by letter, not least because of the Baron's deafness and delicate health. Still, they came to know one another quite well. Underhill and others report the depth, generosity, and good humor of the Baron's personality, which they experienced as radiating from his life of prayer. People would say the same of Underhill later in her life, calling her a "mother of souls." After von Hugel's death, Underhill wrote of a sense of continuing "contact" with his spirit. The relationship between them, though it lasted less than two years, clearly played a formative role. Wrigley-Carr insists persuasively that Underhill was not simply a "popularizer" of von Hugel's ideas. She shows instead the depth of formation that comes out of this friendship. To this friendship Underhill owes a fresh centering on Christ—she credits the Baron's prayers with leading her to "experience Christ"—and an appreciation of what she often calls our "amphibious existence" as creatures of matter and spirit. A Roman Catholic himself, the Baron encouraged Underhill's return to the Anglican church rather than pushing her toward a conversion to Roman Catholicism. This decision led to Underhill's important and persisting contributions to the revival of retreats and the contemplative life in the Anglican tradition, for both clergy and laity. The organization of this book indirectly provides some guidance to scholars and practitioners who desire to go deeper with the themes of spiritual formation and the journey toward Christian spiritual maturity that are threaded through [End Page 162] Wrigley-Carr's discussion. The subheadings within these chapters, for example, become a remarkably concise and helpful road map to some of the themes that often arise in relationships of spiritual guidance. For example...

Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c.1840-1914, by Rowan Strong

Reviewed by: Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c.1840–1914 by Rowan Strong Tamara Wagner (bio) Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c.1840–1914, by Rowan Strong; pp. ix + 302. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £74.00, $100.00. This study fills an overlooked gap in current research on emigration. Rowan Strong’s Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c.1840–1914, examines in detail the active role of religious societies in nineteenth-century emigration movements. While there has been a valuable outpouring in recent years of studies on migration in the global nineteenth century, the functions and, in particular, the intricacies of religion [End Page 693] have tended to be sidestepped. At best, religion is addressed in passing, or religiously motivated societies such as the SPG (the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) or the SPCK (the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) are referenced in the context of various pro-emigration institutes without the necessary dissection of how Victorian Christianity informed different practices as well as ideologies. Strong’s book proves that such critical attention adds valuable insight to both nineteenth-century emigration studies and Church history. It is indeed an impressive, meticulous, and carefully nuanced account that will be of interest to scholars working in the interconnected fields of history and literary and cultural studies, particularly in reference to the global nineteenth century, imperialism, the colonial history of Britain’s antipodal colonies (Australia and New Zealand), and popular culture. In exploring shipboard diaries and the work of the Anglican emigrants’ chaplaincy as hitherto-unused “grass-roots sources,” Strong contributes invaluable material to the study of popular cultural productions more generally as well as for emigration studies and research more specifically focused on Anglican Church history (19). Strong considers the Anglican emigrant chaplaincy as “a major religious structural response to British mass emigration in the Victorian period” that generated a global network for the maintenance of the emigrants’ well-being, and this included providing the religious practices they were familiar with (3). The connection to imperialist jingoism was complicated and it significantly changed over the course of the century. Generally, an imported religion was considered a major ingredient of social capital for colonial settlers, but Strong stresses that the Anglican emigrant ministry was genuinely concerned with emigrants’ religious needs rather than with imperialist expansion or colonial strategies. Their efforts “were not always invariably some sort of cover for other political or cultural values” (108). Thus, Strong provides a critical analysis of the competing religious constructions of emigration at the time, distinguishing between the concept of “ecclesiastical social capital for the Church” and imperial social capital and, further, the imperialist jingoism of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century (97). Not all Anglican engagement with the British Empire “saw the empire through a rosy prism as a totally good thing” (107); instead, the chaplaincy network “contained a more predominant dimension of pastoral response to emigrant need,” which could include practical assistance across denominations (110). One of the most important aspects of the study is the way in which emigrant ships as floating villages facilitated encounters across religious boundaries. The emigrant journey, Strong argues, “catalysed religious interactions, which could result in both continuities and changes for emigrants” (110). The result was what Strong terms “interdenominational involvement” (4) and “inter-religious encounters” (18). Although Strong offers several close readings of incidents that provide evidence of an undeniable, ongoing sectarianism, a strength of his study is that it also highlights the breadth of religious persuasions among emigrants. In particular, Strong offers detailed analyses of Catholics, Protestant Irish, Baptists, and Methodists, as well as “The Freethinking and the Indifferent” (161) in nineteenth-century accounts of the voyage, although unfortunately there is only a brief paragraph on “Non-Christians” (165). The problem here, Strong shows, is the lack of sources. Only one shipboard diary even mentions non-Christians other than freethinkers, doing so in only a brief note. Earlier in the study, Strong [End Page 694] references the activities of the Salvation Army and the Mormons and briefly describes encounters between Jews and Anglican chaplains, yet it is...

Salvation in a Wounded World. Towards a Spectral Theology of Mission

Abstract This article argues that there is a growing discrepancy between theological and critical approaches to mission: while critical mission studies have abandoned teleological frameworks for the narration of mission history, historico-theological teleologies still prove to be influential in theological conceptualizations of mission. As a result, there is a lack of theological language that can respond constructively to the interdisciplinary re-reading of mission history – mission theology is immunized from the interdisciplinary critique of mission history. Based on this diagnosis, this article asks what kind of theological approach can account for the complex entanglements of Christian knowledge production into the deadly politics of modern colonialism. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that intersects theology and postcolonial trauma studies, it investigates the narratives of decolonization that emerged around the recent renovation of the Afrika Museum in Brussels, Belgium, and develops from this analysis building blocks towards a ‘spectral theology.’