Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures

Flüchter and Wirbser are to be congratulated for convening a superb group of scholars for a volume that wonderfully advances our understanding of three themes indicated in its title.First, we learn much about "translating catechisms," their composition and translation in multiple settings far from the places in which they were composed.Second, we can better see the (im)possibility of "translating cultures"-the West to the world, the world to the West-as well as the extraordinary efforts made by realistic missionaries in recasting Christian culture for the sake of indigenous populations who in turn received Christian culture on their own terms.Third, and in light of the preceding, we can review from multiple perspectives the sixteenth-to eighteenthcentury "global expansion of Catholicism" (largely through the lens of Jesuit endeavors) that, despite money, power, and arms of the colonizing West, was always a series of encounters in which the indigenous peoples did not entirely surrender their agency in the creation of local Catholicisms, at least those that would endure.As co-editor Antje Flüchter says in her introduction, this global frame indicates a "turning away from the concept of evangelisation as a oneway street.Rather than focusing only on the transfer from Western Europe to the world, we must also consider and analyse the circulation between the non-European regions of the world, as well as the repercussions from the periphery to the centre" (9).Flüchter's points note a creative paradox: through the ministries of loyal Jesuits, Tridentine orthodoxy kept encountering religious cultures by no means amenable to the strict interpretation of the Council of Trent's dictates; and yet those same Jesuits were the champions of adaptation everywhere they went.The early Jesuits were not in a modern sense tolerant and open-minded; they proselytized on behalf of the truth, aiming to save people from their own religions.Yet they had great imagination in creating templates in which vital

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