The globalization of Christianity, its spread and appeal to peoples of non- European origin, is by now a well-known phenomenon. Scholars increasingly realize the importance of natives rather than foreign missionaries in the process of evangelization. This volume contributes to the understanding of this process through case studies of encounters with Christianity from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples who converted. More importantly, by exploring overarching, general terms such as conversion and syncretism and by showing the variety of strategies and processes that actually take place, these studies lead to a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural religious interactions in general—from acceptance to resistance—thus enriching the vocabulary of religious interaction. The contributors tackle these issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—history, anthropology, religious studies—and present a broad geographical spread of cases from China, Vietnam, Australia, India, South and West Africa, North and Central America, and the Caribbean.

In this book, David Lindenfeld proposes a new dimension to the study of world history. Here, he explores the global expansion of Christianity since 1500 from the perspectives of the indigenous people who were affected by it, and helped change it, giving them active agency. Integrating the study of religion into world history, his volume surveys indigenous experience in colonial Latin America, Native North America, Africa and the African diaspora, the Middle East, India, East Asia, and the Pacific. Lindenfeld demonstrates how religion is closely interwoven with political, economic, and social history. Wide-ranging in scope, and offering a synoptic perspective of our interconnected world, Lindenfeld combines in-depth analysis of individual regions with comprehensive global coverage. He also provides a new vocabulary, with a spectrum ranging from resistance to acceptance and commitment to Christianity, that articulates the range and complexity of the indigenous conversion experience. Lindenfeld's cross-cultural reflections provide a compelling alternative to the Western narrative of progressive development.

The Viking Congresses bring together scholars of archaeology, philology, history, toponymy, numismatics and a number of other disciplines to discuss the Viking Age from a variety of viewpoints. This volume contains 44 peer-reviewed papers selected from those presented at the 18th Viking Congress held in Denmark in August 2017. The contributors take up the interdisciplinary challenge, and the papers cover a wide range of subjects, rooted in the past, but also connecting to the present.

This book brings attention to the understudied and often overlooked question of how curricula and classroom practices might inadvertently reproduce exclusionary discourses and narratives that omit or negate particular cultures, histories, and wisdom traditions. With a focus on representations and classroom practices related especially to ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, it includes unique contributions from scholars studying these questions in various contexts. The book offers a range of important studies from various contexts across the Americas, including Canada, the various member nations of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), Puerto Rico, and the United States. The various chapter contributions address and discuss nuances of each of the contexts under study. The contributions also help highlight some key commonalities across these contexts, including how dominant discourses and various forces have historically shaped—and continue to shape and reproduce— such omissions, misrepresentations, and marginalization. In addition to seeking to reconcile with some of these ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, the book charts a path forward toward more holistic analytical frameworks as well as more inclusive and balanced representations and classroom practices in these aforementioned geographic contexts and beyond. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, undergraduate, and graduate students with interests in Indigenous education, curriculum studies, citizenship education, history of education, religion, and educational policy.

Drawing on first person accounts, Asia in the Making of Christianity studies conversion in the lives of Christians throughout Asia, past and present. Fifteen contributors treat perennial questions about conversion: continuity and discontinuity, conversion and communal conflict, and the politics of conversion. Some study individuals (An Chunggŭn of Korea, Liang Fa of China, Nehemiah Goreh of India), while others treat ethnolinguistic groups or large-scale movements. Converts sometimes appear as proto-nationalists, while others are suspected of cultural treason. Some transition effortlessly from leadership in one religious community into Christian ministry, while others re-convert to new forms of Christianity. The accounts collected here underscore the complexity of conversion, balancing individual agency with broader social trends and combining micro- with macrocontextual approaches.

This book investigates the Mission of the Reformed Church in America sent to Arabia in 1889 to preach the Gospel, and which operated in the Persian Gulf until 1973. It also explores the various cultural encounters between missionaries and Muslims, and discusses conversion and the place of Islam in the Protestant eschatology. It maintains that John G. Lansing from the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Jersey, who founded the Arabian Mission, deliberately dedicated the Mission to “direct Muslim evangelism”. In terms of premillennialism, Lansing “moved” Islam into the very centre of the theological discourse, and presented the evangelization of Muslims as critical for Christ’s Second Coming. This made the Arabian Mission unique among the American Protestant Missions, and placed the Church and missionaries between religious pluralism and the obligations of the Great Commission.

High in the eastern Himalayan foothills, people had a unique vantage point on the British Empire. The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj presents a history of Mizoram in Northeast India told from historical Indigenous perspectives of encounters with empire from the 1890s to the 1920s. Based on a wide range of research and enriched by sources newly digitised by the author through the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, Kyle Jackson sheds new light on the complex and violent processes of how and why diverse populations of highland clans in the Indo-Burmese borderlands came to redefine themselves as Christian Mizos. By using historical Indigenous concepts and logics to approach early twentieth-century imperial encounters, Jackson guides readers into a decolonial history of Northeast India, demonstrating the value of thinking not just about the histories of colonized peoples and concepts but also with them.