non-Christian Peoples Research Articles

‘The Shipwreck of the Turks’: Sovereignty, Barbarism and Civilization in the Legal Order of the Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean

Abstract This article focuses on the consequences of a single major international affair — the shipwreck of a French ship carrying 165 Muslim pilgrims along the southern shores of Sicily in 1716 — to address two pivotal issues in the reordering of eighteenth-­century legal and political systems: the limits of domestic sovereignty in absolutist states and the status of non-Christian polities in the theory and practice of the law of nations. Both the time and place of this episode, which had a vast resonance at the time, have broad implications for how we write about the development of modern international law. While much of the debate on the maritime dimension of the eighteenth-century law of nations focuses on the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, we spotlight the Mediterranean, where endemic corsairing activities coexisted with age-old diplomatic and day-to-day practices of accommodation and mutual recognition between Christian and Muslim polities. Here we draw attention to shipwrecks that occurred in foreign territorial waters and their heuristic potential for better understanding controversial issues of maritime law, such as the status of shorelines, neutrality and the law of the flag. Even after the Peace of Utrecht (1713–15), which is often regarded as a watershed moment in the history of international law, these rules were far from settled and shipwrecks continued to fuel legal and philosophical battles that extended well beyond the confines of the famous controversy between supporters of mare liberum and advocates of mare clausum. The close examination of the 1716 shipwreck leads us to challenge the land/sea divide as constructed by Carl Schmitt and demonstrate that territorial waters were objects of sovereign disputes in much the same way as land territories. We also show how the emerging Eurocentric discourse about the ‘barbarity’ of non-Christian peoples and nations coexisted with intellectual, economic and diplomatic forces interested in establishing formal agreements between Western European nations, the Ottoman Empire and its North African provinces.

Shylock in Fuquieo: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the Trial of a Portuguese Stranger by China’s Courts in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations

In 1548, the Portuguese merchant Galeotto Perera was captured along with his shipmates in the waters off China’s southeastern coast. In his account of his time as a prisoner in Fuquieo (in contemporary Fujian province), Perera details his trial before the city’s magistrates in a Chinese court of law, writing of his amazement when he and his fellow Portuguese merchants were acquitted of the charges brought against them by two of the city’s most prominent men. Perera’s prison account reached an Elizabethan readership via Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589), a sprawling compendium of European travel writing translated into English. In this essay, I maintain that the outcome of Shylock’s trial in Shakespeare’s comedy entails a reversal of Perera’s legal fortunes in China. In light of Perera’s assertion that the Chinese legal process “cannot be falsified, as it happeneth sometimes with vs,” I argue that The Merchant of Venice asks why these European failures of justice, mercy, and truth sometimes happen in Europe’s courts and in negotiations with non-Christian peoples. I aim to demonstrate that the comedy’s treatment of economic and religious exchange with strangers is inflected by Perera’s account of his encounters with the Chinese during his time in Fuquieo—as well as by other travel writings collected by Hakluyt that describe legal, financial, and inheritance quandaries that European traders faced during their travels to places like China, Java, and modern-day Myanmar.

Developing Pentecostal church planting pedagogy that responds to social need and ecological crisis

ABSTRACT Assemblies of God (AOGGB) have consistently sought to respond to a fallen humanity which left to itself faces the fire of eschatological demise. AOG has been in the process of helping its churches to recapture their vision for church planting in order to help non-Christian peoples discover a Christian faith. A theology of the inbreaking of a new heaven and a new earth, as the goal of the church’s mission, is central to a missional ecclesiology based on the Missio Dei. AOG has rebranded its college as, ‘Missio Dei Leadership and Theological College’. It is seeking to equip leaders and churches for church planting and discipleship formation. This article makes a case for the development of church planting education programmes that can equip believers to bring hope to a world in need of God’s coming new creation. The body of Christ needs to represent the coming new creation by the way it seeks to participate in the Spirit of Christ’s healing presence in the midst of a fallen and compromised cosmos.

ВЗЛЕТ И ПАДЕНИЕ ТЕРМИНА «ПОЛИТИЧНЫЙ» В РОССИИ XVIII В.: К ПРЕДЫСТОРИИ ПОНЯТИЯ «ЦИВИЛИЗАЦИЯ»

The article is devoted to the prehistory of the emergence in the Russian political language of such an important concept for the European culture of the Modern times as civilization. In view of the historiography, the article focuses on the adjective politichnyy. In the language of Muscovy in the 16th–17th centuries, the notion of barbarians was mainly used to mean “non-Christian peoples” for whom Christians were contrasted. In the second half of the 17th century, ideas according to which barbarism was associated with a lack of knowledge and science, as well as manners, were introduced to Russia and later adopted by the elite. From this position, Russia was seen, above all, as a barbarous country. With the successes of Peter the Great reforms and the advances in the European knowledge, Russia’s status as a politichnyy nation began to be recognized, which was officially proclaimed in 1721. By the first quarter of the 19th century, the adjective politichnyy stopped being used to describe the stage of a nation’s development which opposed to barbarism. Politichnyy was used to mean “courteous”. This was due to the fact that the politichnyy stage, perceived as external assimilation of manners and knowledge, was absorbed by the idea of enlightenment, which implied interiorization of assimilated knowledge and a corresponding change in human behavior.

To Walk with Slaves: Jesuit Contexts and the Atlantic World in the Cartagena Mission to Enslaved Africans, 1605–1654

The Jesuit mission to enslaved Africans founded in 1605 in Cartagena de las Indias is amongst the most extraordinary religious developments of early colonial Latin America. By the time Alonso de Sandoval, S.J. and Pedro Claver, S.J. began their work to baptize and catechize the thousands of slaves who passed through Cartagena’s port each year, the Society of Jesus had already established a global missionary enterprise, including an extensive network of communication amongst its missionaries and colleges. Amidst this intramissionary context, Sandoval wrote De instauranda Aethiopum salute—a treatise informed largely by these annual letters, personal correspondences, and interactions with the diverse multitudes of people who could be encountered in this early colonial cosmopolitan city—aimed at promoting the necessity of African salvation. From East Asia to Latin America, Jesuits followed the example of their apostolic missionary, Francis Xavier, to bring the Catholic faith to non-Christian peoples. Through De instauranda and the Catholic Church’s collected testimony for the sainthood of Claver, we see how Sandoval and Claver, like other Jesuits of the time, arose as innovative and unique missionaries, adapting to their context while attempting to model the Jesuit missionary spirit. In doing so, this article posits, the historical-religious context of the early modern Atlantic world and global Jesuit missions influenced Sandoval and Claver to accompany enslaved Africans as a missionary theology.

Non-Christian Religions in the work of Uchimura Kanzō

Non-Christian Religions in the work of Uchimura Kanzō James Harry Morris (bio) Keywords Uchimura Kanzō, Non-Church Movement, Interreligious Dialogue, Interfaith Dialogue, Interreligious Relations, Christian-Buddhist Relations, Christian-Muslim Relations The first Protestant missionaries came to Japan in 1859 following the ratification of the five Ansei Treaties negotiated between Japan and several western powers (the United States, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands) the previous year.1 The missionaries initially focused on language acquisition, translation and teaching, gaining only a handful of converts until the government began to adopt a more liberal stance toward Christianity in 1873.2 By 1891, there were approximately 30,000 Japanese converts to Protestantism and by 1930 there were over 190,000.3 Nevertheless, Christianity has, historically and contemporarily, failed to take seed amongst the Japanese people, with Mark Mullins noting, for instance, that "annual statistics have indicated for decades that no more than one percent of the Japanese are church members."4 Indeed, since Christianity "cuts across vital social aspects of belonging, [it] tends to be rather antithetical to Japanese feelings of identity."5 In addition to this, foreign Protestant missionaries have tended to import Christianity as part of a colonial and neo-colonial western package that provides little to no room for dialogue between Christianity and Japanese modes of thought, being, and practice, whether religious or secular. Historically missionaries "tended to emphasize a total discontinuity between the Christian faith and Japanese religious traditions and practices. Indigenous traditions needed to be 'displaced' or removed to make room for the Gospel and authentic Christian faith. The missionaries had the 'truth of the Gospel,' and the Japanese were totally lost in sin."6 [End Page 196] Simultaneously, during the second half of the nineteenth century many Japanese viewed Christianity as incompatible with Japanese values.7 As a result of these factors, some Japanese theologians have attempted to theologize from Japanese contexts in an ecclesial environment independent from western missionary organizations. Uchimura Kanzō's (1861–1930) founding of the Mukyōkai (Non-Church Movement) in 1901 marked the first—and one of the most famous—attempts to develop an indigenous Christian movement along these lines. Uchimura's attempts to find points of commonality between Christianity and the Japanese context led him to begin to grapple theologically with themes pertinent to interfaith dialogue.8 In this paper, I will explore some of these themes in Uchimura's work and seek to situate his theology within its wider historical context. I will argue that Uchimura uses references to non-Christian religions as literary devices and as examples for the betterment of Christianity, while also postulating that God was active in the religious histories of non-Christian peoples. a man of two worlds From his youth, Uchimura lived abridge two worlds: Asian and western, Japanese and North American, non-Christian and Christian. Scholars have been divided in their assessments as to whether it was Japanese or western contexts and their influences that played the most important role in Uchimura's life and work. Mullins, however, provides a suitable middle ground, illustrating that Uchimura was simultaneously indebted to western thought and convinced, in contradistinction to the missionaries, that "native traditions provided a positive foundation for Christianity in Japan."9 A brief overview of Uchimura's life may help to elucidate some of the multiple factors that shaped his thought. Uchimura's educational background was predominantly western. Born into a samurai family, he attended Takasakihan Eigakkō (Takasaki Domain English School) until 1873, Arima Shigakkō (Arima Private School), where he had his first interactions with Christianity, until 1874, and Tōkyō Gaikokugo Gakkō (Tokyo School of Foreign Language),10 before enrolling in Sapporo Nōgakkō (Sapporo Agricultural College) in 1877.11 It was here that Uchimura converted to Christianity, receiving a Methodist baptism from American missionary Merriam Colbert Harris (1846–1921) in 1878.12 Following several years of work after his graduation in 1881, Uchimura emigrated to the United States, where he matriculated at Amherst College in 1885 and completed his second bachelor's [End Page 197] degree in 1887.13 Following his graduation from Amherst, he initially enrolled in Hartford Theological Seminary, but returned to Japan in 1888 to...

Проблематика перевода и интерпретации фундаментальной богословской терминологии на примере миссионерской деятельности Маттео Риччи в Китае

The article discusses the problems of translation and interpretation of fundamental theological terminology in the linguistic aspect of the Inculturation of Christianity. Catholic missionaries, guided by the strategy of Inculturation of Christianity, are trying to adapt the texts of the Holy Bible, translating them into various languages in order to spread Christian doctrine among non-Christian peoples. The author refers to the documented provisions established during the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and governing translations of the Holy Scriptures, liturgical and church texts into the languages of non-Christian peoples and cultures. Using the missionary work of Matteo Ricci in China as an example, the author examines the problems of translating and transmitting the meaning of theological concepts that have no analogies in the Chinese language. The main strategies of M. Ricci for the cultural accommodation of Christianity in China was the study of the Chinese language, understanding of semantic and cultural significance in order to translate fundamental theological concepts without losing or deforming the main meaning of Christian teaching.

Этничность старообрядчества в интеграционных процессах прошлого и настоящего

The article discusses the features of ethnic culture inherent in the Old Believers of Altai related to the history of Russian Orthodoxy of the pre-schism period, in which it showed its exceptional ability to integrate non-Russian nonChristian peoples by broadcasting a Christian worldview, without affecting the foundations of their ethnic originality and without suppressing their ethnic identity. The nature of this ability is rooted in the specifics of Russian Orthodoxy, organically linked to Slavic pre-Christian culture.

ИНКУЛЬТУРАЦИЯ ХРИСТИАНСТВА В КОНТЕКСТЕ МЕЖКУЛЬТУРНОГО И МЕЖРЕЛИГИОЗНОГО ДИАЛОГА РИМСКО-КАТОЛИЧЕСКОЙ ЦЕРКВИ

In the missionary work of the Roman Catholic Church among non-Christian peoples and cultures, the Church resorts to the use of strategies for the inculturation of Christianity, based on the establishment and development of intercultural and interreligious dialogues. Based on the analysis of the official documents of the Roman Catholic Church (declaration of the Second Vatican Council, social doctrine of the Catholic Church, encyclicals and apostolic exhortations of the pontiffs), the author attempts to reveal the problems of the inculturation of Christianity rising in the context of intercultural and interreligious dialogues and making impact on the missionary work of the Catholic Church. Thanks to the reforms and subsequent decisions of the Second Vatican Council, the aspects, goals, tasks, and instructions for the dialogue of Christianity with non-Christian religions were formulated and set out. In future, the topic of intercultural and interreligious dialogues was developed and expressed in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, as well as in the encyclicals and apostolic exhortations of the Roman Catholic pontiffs. According to the Roman Catholic Church position, interreligious and intercultural dialogues are aimed at mutual enrichment of various spiritual cultures, and their development should prepare the ground for further evangelization.

Introduction: “Deboxing” the Ecumenical Box

Introduction: “Deboxing” the Ecumenical Box

Orienting the Self: The German Literary Encounter with the Eastern Other by Debra N. Prager

Reviewed by: Orienting the Self: The German Literary Encounter with the Eastern Other by Debra N. Prager Lee M. Roberts Orienting the Self: The German Literary Encounter with the Eastern Other. By Debra N. Prager. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. Pp. 338. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571135940. Linking representations of the East, broadly understood, in German literature from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century, this book examines various often fantastical images of the Orient familiar to so many Western audiences. Orienting the Self draws solidly from the scholarship on the various German Orientalisms, but it does so in ways that often challenge more generally accepted scholarly views on the topic. The result is an insightful analysis of canonical literature recognizable to most scholars in German studies, including Parzival, Fortunatus, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Effi Briest, and Der Zauberberg, that traces commonalities in the various depictions across the centuries but also pinpoints the slight changes in the discourse on the so-called East-West divide. The following presents a view of some of these aspects of this thoroughly absorbing piece of scholarship. In discussing Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, this book focuses on the relationship between the eponymous hero and the equally heroic, if not ultimately superior, warrior from the Orient, Feirefiz, who is not only Parzival’s half-brother from the same father but also a man with both distinctly European and Oriental features. As such, he embodies the familiar exotic. Their encounter symbolizes the meeting of two great cultures—West and East, Christianity and Islam—but also Parzival’s own reflection of himself. Prager’s analysis shows how Parzival’s openly positive depiction of the Arab world, Africa, and India was something highly unconventional for its time. Like other similar texts, it contrasts what was generally knowable about the Orient in thirteenth-century Europe, including facts often conveyed via other literary works (e.g., place names in Chrétien’s Perceval) with what was more purely fictional (e.g., legendary monstrous creatures in India). Unlike many other fictions of the period, however, Wolfram’s Parzival places non-Western, non-Christian peoples toward the center of the action and allows them to play a key role in the hero’s—and thus also the world’s—salvation. Fortunatus, too, places the East at the center of its story, albeit from the perspective of a protagonist who appears to belong to neither West nor East. He is a Cypriot who sometimes takes a rather German view of the world, as Prager reveals. As a Volksbuch/ Prosaroman, Fortunatus departs from many of the narrative features common to courtly romance to focus more on middle-class issues (e.g., money, class conflict, and questions of identity). Prager’s emphasis, however, is on how this text presents the concept of being a foreigner abroad. In this respect, Fortunatus is unlike other works at the time, for it treats not only the East as Other, but also Europe as foreign to anyone from another part of the world. In fact, in both West and East, the hapless visitor from elsewhere can be blamed for any misfortune that occurs. Indeed, the [End Page 167] protagonist finds himself constantly on the run for things he did not do. In comparing reasons for travel between East and West, however, Fortunatus suggests that the Eastern traveler would find the German-speaking West ultimately less hospitable—more dangerous even—than the Westerner would the Orient. Like the two works considered thus far, Friedrich von Hardenberg’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1799) places the development of the hero in relation to various concepts of the East in the foreground. The character Zulima, a woman captured in the East by a crusader and brought to the West, is an externally recognizable element of the Orient in this novel, but the protagonist is also internally shaped by a range of romantic notions that allow him to become one with the East. Prager explains Heinrich’s character against the background of new ideas at the time about Poesie, as well as Kantian philosophy and the romantics’ interest in the languages and cultures of the East (e.g., Sanskrit, the Sakontala). In Hardenberg...

Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages by Nancy Mandeville Caciola

Reviewed by: Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages by Nancy Mandeville Caciola Josh Timmermann Nancy Mandeville Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2016), 363 pp. Over the past few decades, the study of the complex relationship between the living and the dead in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages has proven to be an exceptionally fertile area of inquiry, with vital contributions by Peter Brown, Patrick Geary, Éric Rebillard, Robert Bartlett, and Thomas Laqueur, among numerous other scholars. Much of that work has been centered around the cults of the martyrs and saints, with Bartlett's magisterial study, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation, of particular note among recent publications. Inevitably, saints pass through the macabre mise-en-scène of Nancy Mandeville Caciola's Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages, but they are made to blend in among the mosaic of zombies, revenants, shades, and spirits—conceptions of the returned dead that may trace back to Europe's ancient pagan cultures. At the outset of her study, Caciola asserts that she is not proposing that medieval Europe was "cryptopagan." She adopts a more nuanced stance, contending that medieval traditions, customs, and ideas concerning death have too often been regarded as "unproblematically Christian" (14). To be sure, scholars have long attempted to reconstruct pre-Christian cultures and traditions through alleged "survivals," preserved especially among the rural, "rustic" communities that represented a majority of the medieval population. This approach is exemplified by Carlo Ginzburg's classic studies of early modern witchcraft, an apparent source of inspiration for Caciola's project. Yet, in more recent scholarship, the pendulum has swung mainly, if not decisively, in the other direction, toward a conception of medieval Europe as having been almost thoroughly "Christianized" (if in different ways, following patterns of missionary activity and imperial "reform" efforts), perhaps as early as the [End Page 196] Carolingian era. Caciola pushes back against this tendency to assume near-totalizing Christianity by "tak[ing] seriously the contributions of earlier pagan societies to the distinctively medieval culture that superseded them" (14). Attitudes toward death and the afterlife, Caciola asserts, provide an especially revealing window onto this type of sustained—though by no means static—syncretism. As all medievalists are acutely aware, the great majority of extant texts from the early to central Middle Ages were written by ecclesiastical figures, whether to convert non-Christian peoples or to "correct" the beliefs and practices of fellow Christians. Consequently, Caciola endeavors to read such texts against the grain; ostensibly isolating the author's specific (Christian) perspective and prerogatives, she takes the elements that remain thereafter as incidental, yet reliable, evidence of contemporary beliefs and practices with winding, twisting roots in the primordial (pre-Christian) past. One chapter, for example, attempts a critical reading of the eleventh-century bishop Thietmar of Merseburg's Chronicon, from which Caciola argues that the "ghost stories" therein "interweave pagan and Christian elements promiscuously, though perhaps only partially consciously" (142). The chapter then proceeds to "triangulate" Thietmar's text alongside various others, especially Arthurian narratives, from (Caciola concedes) "widely spaced times and places" (144), in order to identify seemingly congruous data attested across a broad range. Another chapter examines "spiritist cults" in southern France, extracting purported attestations from the typically dismissive accounts of local clerics. Some of Caciola's demonstrations of these interpretative strategies are more successful than others, but even where her evidence is thin and her theses less than fully convincing, her book remains an engrossing read. Before moving on to the period ca. 1000–1500, the book's primary focus, Caciola establishes the basic parameters for Christian positions on the relationship between the living and the dead. Unsurprisingly, she locates these positions in the formative age of Late Antiquity and the thought of the Latin Church Fathers. After quickly surveying the scriptural precedents from which the Fathers drew, Caciola erects a binary opposition between "Augustinian" and "Gregorian" views of contact between the living and the dead. Essentially, the "Augustinian model" held that "the dead, once departed, are...

The Church Missionary Society and Architecture in the Mission Field: Evangelical Anglican Perspectives on Church Building Abroad, c. 1850-1900

The Gothic Revival occupies a central place in the architectural development of the Church of England in the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. Within the expanding British colonial world, in particular, the neo-Gothic church became a centrally important expression of both faith and identity throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. From a symbolic and communicative perspective, the style represented not only a visual link to Britain, but also the fundamental expression of the Church of England as an institution and of the culture of Englishness. As such, it carried with it a wide range of cultural implications that suited the needs of settler communities wishing to re-established their identity abroad. Expansion during this period, however, was not only limited to the growth of settler communities but was also reflected in growing Anglican missions to the non-Christian peoples of annexed territories. The two primary organs of the Church of England in the field, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), actively employed the revived medieval style throughout the Empire as missions were solidified through infrastructure development. As a popular style with direct connotations to the Christian faith, revived medieval design became increasingly popular with Anglican missionaries abroad in the period between the early 1840s and the end of the century. Not only did its origins in ecclesiastical buildings make it attractive, but it was also stylistically distinctive, and set apart as a sacred style from both secular and ‘heathen’ structures.

The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. By Rebecca Anne Goetz. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. xvi + 224 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race . By Rebecca Anne Goetz . Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press , 2012. xvi + 224 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn this enterprising study, Rebecca Goetz, a historian at Rice University, charts what she identifies as the process whereby Virginia slaveholders used Christianity to invent race in the English colony. The Baptism of Early Virginia is the first substantial study of race in the Anglo-American colonies to engage centrally with what Goetz calls This was the idea that Christianity was a heritable condition and that non-Christian peoples--particularly Indians and Africans--were naturally incapable or less capable of conversion.She explains the conflict between Virginia's missionaries, who sought to convert Indians and Africans, and the planters who generally opposed their efforts by claiming that Africans were naturally incapable of such. She then charts the legislation, social divisions, labor practices, and theological arguments concerning hereditary heathenism in Virginia. In chapter 1, Goetz states that before colonizing Virginia, the English people distinguished themselves from the Irish (whom they colonized) and from Muslims and American Indians by emphasizing cultural as opposed to racial distinctions. Since these peoples were judged capable of conversion, she claims, they were not racially defined. Conspicuously absent in this chapter is a discussion of how English Christians engaged with Jews. Chapter 2 argues that violent Anglo-Indian wars undermined the optimism of English settlers that Indians might convert to Christianity. Instead, the English began to promote the ideology of hereditary heathenism. Chapter 3 examines English settler proscriptions against interracial sex and marriage (especially between the English and Africans). By 1705, Goetz concludes, these attitudes had fully hardened into race. The fourth chapter examines the legal and theological administration of baptism in Virginia. Whereas and not physical appearance dominated at the time the earliest African slaves arrived in Virginia, Goetz proffers, the 1700s witnessed the triumph of phenotype over religious identity as the basis of social status in Virginia. And baptism operated eventually as a racial institution imposing the ideology that only the English could be truly Christian (111). In her fifth chapter, Goetz specifically examines how Virginia's English settlers articulated whiteness as a racial identity, a process she connects to an emerging religious toleration in the colony that extended to Quakers but not to Catholic convicts, blacks, Indians, and mulattoes (137). And in chapter 6, Goetz examines how some free and enslaved Africans pursued both Christianity and freedom (these were metonymic), thereby challenging the ideology of hereditary heathenism. An epilogue provides a tidy recap of the foregoing arguments.The book is without question a seasoned demonstration of historical method. Goetz's lucid prose reveals her detailed, intimate mastery of archival sources--court records, pamphlets, and correspondence. And she distills her discussion of the primary works through a disciplined command over the larger historical context of Virginia. She explains, for instance, that the Virginia Indians provided food for English settlers because this was a Native convention for dealing with political inferiors. And she explicates the intricate political philosophy that guided Anglo-Indian intermarriage from the perspective of the Virginia Indians. Experts in the history of English colonialism will also appreciate the fresh reading Goetz brings to this study of the Chesapeake because she combines incredibly rich historical detail with an exciting query into how Virginia's slaveholding elite shaped religion and race in the colony. Thus, it is easy to see that this monograph, which contributes so uniquely to her field, will serve professional researchers as a valuable source of historical data for years to come. …

An Eye for Prices, an Eye for Souls: Americans in the Indian Subcontinent, 1784-1838

Between Independence and the late 1830s, Americans' perception of India changed dramatically. Such a shift was due to the transition from merchant-mariners to missionaries as the predominant professions to visit the subcontinent. From the Treaty of Paris to the War of 1812, American trade with India boomed as Philadelphia, Boston, and Salem merchants rode the winds of neutral trade to windfall profits. Largely forbidden from trading with the houses of the East India Company, however, American businessmen had to look elsewhere for trading partners. They found them in the well-educated native Indian merchants called banians in Calcutta and dubashes in Madras. Since their success in India was predicated on the quality of their commercial relationships with native Indian merchants, American captains and supercargoes had every reason to overcome cultural differences. While early national American merchants varied in their ability to drop prejudices, many of the most successful India traders forged remarkably respectful, fair, and even friendly relationships with their indigenous counterparts. The profitability of the America India trade dropped precipitously after Congress passed new tariff legislation in 1816. By then, a new, more evangelically minded generation of Americans had begun to land in Anglo-Indian ports. The rise of American missionary labor in the subcontinent resulted in a very different image of native Indians and their civilization. Unlike merchants, missionaries had every reason to exploit cultural and religious differences, both for publicity and for reasons of funding. Their writings and publications had a profound effect on the way in which ordinary Americans thought of themselves, of non-Christian peoples, and of their destiny as a people.

Christian Churches and Their Peoples, 1840–1965: A Social History of Religion in Canada by Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (review)

Reviewed by: Christian Churches and Their Peoples, 1840–1965: A Social History of Religion in Canada by Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau Terence J. Fay S.J. Christian Churches and Their Peoples, 1840–1965: A Social History of Religion in Canada. By Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau. [Themes in Canadian History, 9.] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2010. Pp. x, 232. $65.00 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-8020-8949-6; $27.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-8020-8632-7.) The well-known authors of Canadian religious history, Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, team up in this volume to assert that the Canadian people from 1840 to 1965 experienced their religion both inside and outside institutional churches. From this central theme they develop the argument that the study of popular religion for the historian is as important as the study of institutional religions. They see popular religion not as the radical religious fringe but as “the beliefs and practices of laypeople” (p. 1) who simply follow the forms of religion that are different from those recommended by clergy. The authors go on to contend that although institutional religion fluctuated during this extended period, popular religion “remained relatively constant between 1840 and the 1970s” and grew in number (p. 4). The authors develop their themes chronologically beginning with the period from 1840 to 1870 when the institutional churches left their otherworldly view of religion behind to move “to more open and anonymous institutions . . . to evangelize Canadian society” (p. 60). Adjusting to expectations of religious people, these religious institutions initially gained congregants by voluntary attendance, but the subsequent period (1880–1910) turned out to [End Page 182] be “one of the most conflictual periods in Canadian religious history” (p. 61). Tensions rose between rural people and urbanists, individuals within sectarian congregations, and males and women’s rights advocates. For many religionists, social service became central to Christian life and replaced the concern for the fatherhood of God. But the most pellucid of their arguments was the authors’ discussion of the Christian missions to the Canadian Northwest. Casting doubt on the historical view of missionaries as “heroic figures” and likewise the revised view of the missionary as an “anti-hero wreaking utter destruction upon non-Christian societies,” the authors choose a third, more complex interpretation of mission work as a “cultural encounter between missionaries and non-Christian peoples” (p. 107). This fresh view contends that “the aboriginal societies were able to select and reinvent the Christian message in order to fashion an indigenized but no less authentic expression of Christianity” (p. 107). In a second assertion about Canadian missions, the authors point out that the different viewpoints among the missionaries, merchants, and government officials in the Northwest were many and that they were far from an oppressive monolith aligned against Indigenous people. Social Christianity emerged among Canadian religions between 1910 and 1940, the authors continue, and demanded that Christian conversions be shared with the community through engagement in social reform. Both men and women’s organizations became part of “a constellation of reform agencies, social policy research, and legislative lobbyists” (p. 142) that helped steer the social policies of the modern Canadian state. The book contends that, during this period, Christian lay leadership drove Canadian social reform. In the 1960s Pierre Berton in The Comfortable Pew is given credit for challenging the Canadian churches to leave their comfort to become critics of the middle class and the social forces that dominate Canadian life. Berton hoped to reinvigorate social concern so that Christians would become “the central animating force for the creation of a truly humanistic culture” (p. 180) that would give leadership to Canadian social reform. A decline began in 1965 for institutional churches, whereas in contrast popular religion grew among Evangelical denominations and Pentecostal groups. The Protestant churches espoused the “freedom of religious choice” that thus decreased church affiliation and could no longer pursue the project of creating a Christian society. Noninstitutional religion continued to attract many believers who followed “a system of private practices and personal values” (p. 199) that remained constant during this period, in contrast to the churches that were in fluctuation. The goal of marriage shifted from procreation and...

Vielfache Bedeutungen: Missionsfotografie zwischen Neuguinea und Europa, 1896 – ca.1930

Images were crucial to the modern mission enterprise. Missionaries exported pictures from Europe to instruct non-Christian peoples in the new faith as well as they produced images from their world-wide fields of work. This study discusses the transnational use of photography on the part of a German Catholic mission in colonial New Guinea, and shows that, with the technical innovations in the 19th century, the visualization of the missionary encounter to European audiences gained significance. This new impact derived from both, the indexical nature of photographs and the meanings they assumed when they were put to use in different contexts and spaces.

The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (review)

Reviewed by: The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe Anna Sapir Abulafia The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe, by Jonathan Boyarin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 208 pp. $32.50 In this study Jonathan Boyarin examines the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century encounter between the Catholic Spaniards and the inhabitants of the Caribbean and Latin America within the wider context of medieval Christian-Jewish (and to some extent Christian-Muslim) relations in Latin Christendom. For the year 1492 did not herald an unprecedented new beginning. Rather, the actions and ruminations of the Spanish explorers and mendicant missionaries echoed many centuries of Christian engagement with Jews (and Muslims) in different parts of Europe. Christian-Jewish relations were especially wrought because of the built-in ambiguities of that encounter. On the one hand, Christianity had emerged from a Jewish cradle to supersede its progenitor; on the other, Christians and Jews continued to vie with each other as rivaling siblings drawing their credentials from the same texts, which each read in opposing [End Page 164] ways. Judaism was theoretically tolerated by Christian teaching, but it was tolerated not for its own sake; Jews were preserved to serve Christians through witnessing to Christian truth by adhering to the Hebrew Bible in which Christians found the prophecies concerning Christ. The fact that they lacked dominion and lived under Christian rule served Christians by showing them how God punished those who rejected Christ. Yet in the end all Jews would recognize Christ as their God and savior. All of this meant that Christian-Jewish relations consisted of a volatile mix of toleration and deprecation. Jews were valued but at the same time feared as ever-present markers of possible opposition to Christian authority. Jews who did convert were often suspected of contaminating Christian purity; baptism was seen as only the beginning of a life-long journey to Christian perfection. (This was true for Christians and Jews alike.) Jews for their part had continually to negotiate their positions with the lords in whose lands they resided, taking advantage of the ever-present gulf between religious theory and pragmatic reality. Recent studies have examined the different trajectories of the medieval Jewries of England, Northern France, Germany, Eastern Europe, and regions of the Latin Mediterranean. Just as there was not one homogeneous medieval Christendom, there was not one medieval Jewry. This is, of course, equally true of the very disparate Muslim world which confronted medieval Christians in many different guises and arenas. As the Normans conquered Sicily and as the Christian kings of Iberia expanded their territories into Al-Andalus, more and more Muslims came under Christian sway. In North Africa and the Levant, however, Muslims were powerful antagonists both respected and feared by Christian knights for their military prowess. Along the frontiers of Eastern Europe Christians faced the military threat of the Mongols and Tartars from the thirteenth century. There were other others than Jews and Muslims! Boyarin's repeated insistence on the need to accept that Europe in 1492 was not a monolithic Christian entity lacking awareness of non-Christians within and without its borders does at times come across as a struggle to unlock an open door. True, there are still plenty of examples in the literature which betray what most scholars would now consider an outdated Christo-centric approach, but serious work in this area has been engaging with the medieval non-Christian other for some time. Indeed David Abulafia's The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus, which must have appeared while this book was in the press, examines the explorations of Columbus within the context of medieval forays into the Canary Islands, and European engagement between Christians and Jews is used as an interpretive tool in an attempt to understand how the Spanish tried to make sense of the large populations of non-Christian peoples they encountered. [End Page 165] Boyarin's emphasis on the paradox between Christian universalistic endeavors to include ever more peoples within the Christian fold and Christian attempts to work ever harder to achieve Christian purity within Christian society is undoubtedly important. As Christian doctrines were...

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Paradigm of Domination

This article argues that the term ‘Indigenous peoples’ is correctly interpreted as ‘dominated peoples’. It is contended that the need for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – adopted by the UN General Assembly on 13 September 2007 – was a direct consequence of (1) a tradition of states defining Indigenous peoples as ‘less-than-human’ and (2) states constructing and institutionalising in law and policy a framework of domination against Indigenous peoples. However, far from being a remedy to these issues, not one of the 46 Articles of the UN Declaration addresses the issue of domination and Indigenous peoples. A critical examination of the UN Declaration must account for the fact that state actors involved in foreign and international affairs are intent on maintaining the status quo and are quite cognisant of the social construction of reality. In the United States in particular, the framework of domination that constitutes US Indian federal Indian law and policy is traced to arguments found in Vatican documents and Royal colonial charters of England that a discovering ‘Christian prince or people’, ‘Christian state’ or ‘Christian power’ had the right to assume an ‘ultimate dominion’ (right of domination) as against original non-Christian (‘heathen’ and ‘infidel’) nations and peoples. It was the issues of lands, resources and self-determination that arose from this Christian European system of categorisation which drove American Indian elders, spiritual and ceremonial leaders, scholars and activists into the international arena in 1977, and eventually resulted in the UN Declaration being adopted 30 years later in 2007. It remains an open question as to whether the UN Declaration provides a means of overturning the dual tradition of domination and dehumanisation that the United States and other states have built and maintained for more than two centuries. In the case of the United States, such a reform on the basis of the UN Declaration seems highly unlikely, given the unwillingness of the US government, including the US Supreme Court, to disavow or discontinue using its system of dominating categories against Indian nations and peoples.

‘Equal to Children of European Origin’

This article explores how transnational forms of history can provide valuable new insights into the way in which colonisers, government and missionaries educated and ‘civilised’ Australian Indigenous peoples in the early years of colonisation. Using early nineteenth-century British government reports and early colonial accounts, it argues that colonial strategies for dealing with non-Christian peoples had their genesis in techniques to control Britain’s poor and rapidly urbanising populations in the wake of the Industrial revolution. Transported to the Australian colonies, developing conceptions of class intersected with ideas about race, educability and the civilising mission, suggesting that early colonial Indigenous education was influenced by nascent British ideas about class as much as racial constructions of an Indigenous ‘other’. This article won the Wiley-Blackwell/Australian Historical Association Prize for 2007, awarded to the best paper presented by a postgraduate student at the New England AHA Regional Conference.