Christian Interculture

What are the challenges and possibilities of writing the histories of Christians in the global South? How can we write the histories of subaltern Christians from colonial and postcolonial contexts? What factors have contributed to cross-cultural and intercultural processes in the globalization of Christianity and its localizations? In this rich collection of essays, authors address these questions. They articulate possibilities and propose methods to draw from and interpret sources available from colonial and postcolonial contexts. They believe that the native Christian has left sufficient records and artifacts to reconstruct their voice and agency and that it is possible to write their histories.Arun W. Jones, one of the organizers of a historiography conference held in 2014 at Emory University and currently the Dan and Lillian Hankey Associate Professor of World Evangelism, compiles the essays presented at the event with an additional essay. He organized these papers into three sections. The first part, composed of three chapters, proposes alternative methods of studying the histories of the marginalized and challenges the caricatures of the native in traditional historiography. With case studies from Japan, Mexico, and Peru, the following section identifies the challenges but also demonstrates methods to recover and interpret the indigenous voices from the early modern period. With case studies from the modern era, the third section interprets the voices of Native American Christians, members of the Philippine Independent Church, and the late Bishop Aloys Bigirumwami from Rwanda.This volume, the third in the series on world christianity by Penn State University, demonstrates how to reconstruct local religion in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Scholars interested in recognizing, recovering, interpreting, and reconstructing the local appropriations of Christianity in the global South would find the variety of proposals made, case studies examined, and methodological approaches employed in the volume helpful. While respecting the texts produced by native Christians, these essays suggest ways forward when written sources are scarce. Resisting the temptation to characterize all native Christians as subaltern, the writers in this book, at least some of them, identify power imbalances among the indigenous Christians and how these imbalances impacted the cross-cultural and intercultural processes. When treated with caution, the texts, images, and voices of non-Christian neighbors, Western missionaries, and, in some cases, colonial interlocutors may also prove to be fertile sources in our study of indigenous Christians and their Christianities. An interest in studying the histories of Christianity in the global South, an awareness of imperial and nationalistic milieus, and the impact of the same on the processes of translation weave these disparate essays together

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