This book explores the strategies adopted by the Jesuit missions under the Portuguese and Spanish patronage vis-à-vis Islamic powers such as the Mughal Empire in South Asia and the expansion of Islam in the Southeast-Asian peripheries. Based on a comparative perspective, this book examines the interconnections between the Jesuit proselytizing activities and the imperial projects of the Iberian crowns in Asia, highlighting the role of the Jesuit missionaries operating in Asian Islamic settings as diplomatic and cultural mediators. It is aimed at researchers and students working on Jesuit missions in South Asia, the Portuguese and Spanish Empires in Asia, early modern cross-cultural diplomacy, early modern travel accounts, and early modern ethnography.

"This book argues that the development of Catholicism in Asia was closely connected with globalization. Since the 16th century Catholicisms has contributed significantly to global connectivity, while at the same time the Church 's global expansion has transformed the Church's own global consciousness. Casanova and Phan adopt a framework of three distinct phases of the development of Catholicism in Asia and Oceania - early modern (16th to 18th centuries), modern Western hegemony (1780s to the 1960s), and the contemporary, after Western hegemony. With this framework, contributors discuss the development of Catholicism in all major countries of the region, including China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Australia. Except for the Philippines and Timor-Leste, Catholicism in Asia is and is likely to remain a minority religion for the foreseeable future. For that reason, however, it can serve as a unique prism through which to look at the processes of globalization in Asia, precisely because the historical processes through which Catholicism took roots in the entire region and became inculturated as an Asian religion are so intimately connected with the processes of globalization"--

This book introduces readers to early American literary studies through original readings of key literary texts.

Buddhist-Muslim relations are usually seen as inherently confrontational. This book challenges the view of Buddhism and Islam as fundamentally irreconcilable by exploring the diverse ways representatives of the two traditions have engaged each other in Southeast Asia—the global frontstage of contemporary Buddhist-Muslim relations—and Japan—a Buddhist-majority country whose ‘Islam policy’ played a significant role in its surge to global power status. It investigates the processes through which mutual perceptions and discourses have developed in response to shifting socio-political circumstances and via the intellectual interventions of leading personalities.

The state of Goa on India's southwest coast was once the capital of the Portuguese-Catholic empire in Asia. When Vasco Da Gama arrived in India in 1498, he mistook Hindus for Christians, but Jesuit missionaries soon declared war on the alleged idolatry of the Hindus. Today, Hindus and Catholics assert their own religious identities, but Hindu village gods and Catholic patron saints attract worship from members of both religious communities. Through fresh readings of early Portuguese sources and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study traces the history of Hindu-Catholic syncretism in Goa and reveals the complex role of religion at the intersection of colonialism and modernity.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Society of Jesus projected a martyrial ethos across Europe's eastern overseas possessions, places that were of extreme importance for the control of transoceanic trade in the western Pacific. Scars of Faith offers a collection of primary sources that deal with the Jesuit martyrdom in the 17th century Mariana Islands. Facing repression and persecution to the point of death meant that Jesuit missionaries were at the heart of the struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, God and the devil in the Spanish Micronesia. And for the Society of Jesus, frontier missions such as the Mariana Islands meant a discourse of spiritual heroes whose violent deaths helped to spread Catholicism at the margins of the Spanish empire.

Named by the International Bulletin of Missionary Studies as an Outstanding Book of 2014 for Mission Studies Despite the ongoing global expansion of Christianity, there remains a lack of comprehensive scholarship on its development in Asia. This volume fills the gap by exploring the world of Asian Christianity and its manifold expressions, including worship, theology, spirituality, inter-religious relations, interventions in society, and mission. The contributors, from over twenty countries, deconstruct many of the widespread misconceptions and interpretations of Christianity in Asia. They analyze how the growth of Christian beliefs throughout the continent is linked with the socio-political and cultural processes of colonization, decolonization, modernization, democratization, identity construction of social groups, and various social movements. With a particular focus on inter-religious encounters and emerging theological and spiritual paradigms, the volume provides alternative frames for understanding the phenomenon of conversion and studies how the scriptures of other religious traditions are used in the practice of Christianity within Asia.