Crossroads of Culture is a study of the Christian churches of northern Malawi and their engagement with and resistance against ancestral beliefs and practices. The main research question is based on a recognition that pioneer Protestant mission stations were built around a tripartite model of being—the body, mind, and spirit. This materialized through the construction of hospitals, schools, and churches, thus embedding the daily activities and priorities of the missions in a body ontology, which breaks with the regional precolonial ontology. Lindland’s case studies address the ways his differently situated interlocutors deal with these conflicting ontologies in life-crises situations. The book is based on a sixteen-month long fieldwork carried out in 1999–2000. Lindland is no stranger to African Christianity as he spent a large part of his childhood and youth in Congo/Zaire with his parents, Baptist missionaries between 1958 and 1985. As such this book continues a long tradition set by notables such as A. T. Bryant, T. Cullen Young, Sundkler, Berglund, and Oosthuizen, each of whom published rich ethnographies based on life-long interaction with African communities and inside knowledge of African mission churches.The book is comprehensive and bears the mark of being a converted PhD thesis. The 614 pages are divided into two parts, which contain twelve chapters and a conclusion. Part 1, “History and Theory,” covers the topics of missiology and anthropology, historical theologies of bodily resurrection, the history of religion and medicine, and the history of the Livingstonian mission. Together these chapters clearly outline the migrations and the religious syncretism that dominated the area leading up to the first missionaries’ arrival in the mid-1860s and the worldview and theological foundation of the pioneer missionaries.The two last chapters of part 1 offer a detailed account of the conflicting models of personhood from vimbuza spirit possession, the African Instigated Churches (AIC), the broader “Born Again” movement, and the “first-wave” mission churches, dominated by the Church of Central Africa, Presbyterian (CCAP). These chapters provide an important and insightful bridge to part 2.In part 2, “Ethnography and Analysis,” the reader is introduced to the non-Christian vimbuza ritual, which includes spirit possession and a number of Christian symbols. In the church context where the author’s fieldwork was based, the less contested part of the vimbuza was the presence of the ancestral mizimu spirits, which were mostly understood as rightfully claiming an influence in the lives of their descendants. The nonancestral virombo, vyanusi, and vimbuza spirits also played a part in these rituals and constituted a bigger challenge for the main interlocutors in Lindland’s detailed case studies.As an anthropologist I found this ethnographic section to be the strength of Lindland’s study. The readers are introduced to three men and a woman who were in different ways engaged with the Embangweni mission hospital which was the focus of his fieldwork. Two of these cases are introduced in depth in chapters 9 and 12. The first was raised as Christian and became an elder in the CCAP and a long-time hospital employee. He had some experiences that he interpreted as a call to become a diviner, and ventured into a long process where he tried to resolve his experience of contradiction between the ancestral call and his Christian convictions. The second was an elderly laboratory employee at the hospital who during a critical illness struggled to align his biomedical knowledge with an illness that also bore the mark of spiritual affliction, which shook the Christian foundation he had built his life upon.Through these cases Lindland opens up a field well known to Africanists with an interest in African Christianity and Central and Southern African history and cultures. The value of the study is the acute focus it places on the challenge African Christianity poses to the particular Western development of the tripartite body that emerged through the Enlightenment. During life crises this ontology came at odds with their illness experiences and had to be negotiated by individuals who, mostly, wanted to belong and adhere to Westernized Christianity. As such the illness narratives that are laid out in some detail in this section constitute a testimony of the combined success and failure of the missions: in short, success because 85 percent of the Malawian population identifies as Christian, but failure because the central tenets of the missionaries’ theology lose out to an African ontology of the body. Here Lindland could have drawn more on the chapter on historical theologies of bodily resurrection, a chapter this reader found superfluous, to underscore that the church movements in northern Malawi seem to draw the church closer to a pre-Enlightenment Christian ontology of the body.The fieldwork for the book was conducted at the turn of the century and the literature presented is mainly published before 2005, with the exception of some newer publications on Malawi. With those limitations the book, with its many detailed footnotes, should provide extensive material for any research in Malawi. It should also find a wide readership among academics interested in African Christianity and theology.