In 1975, Vietnam, united under communism, fell behind a bamboo curtain. Many feared the worst for churches there. But fifteen years later, churches, especially among Vietnam’s ethnic minority mountain peoples, suddenly exploded in number and vitality.

In 1975, Vietnam, united under communism, fell behind a bamboo curtain. Many feared the worst for churches there. But fifteen years later, churches, especially among Vietnam's ethnic minority mountain peoples, suddenly exploded in number and vitality.

This sound interpretation of Vietnamese cultural attitudes contends that a major reason for American difficulties in Viet-Nam has been the failure to appreciate how wide the gulf is between Viet-Nam and the West. Professor Smith first describes Vietnamese political and social traditions and shows how they were challenged by the West after 1858. He examines Viet-Nam's search for independence and modernization in the first half of this century, contrasts the two governments of the partitioned country during the years 1954-1963, and stresses the critical need to reassess attitudes toward Viet-Nam. His sophisticated, ambitious survey of Viet-Nam history will have a lasting value that sets it apart from the scores of ephemeral books on this country.

Throughout American history, Christianity has shaped public opinion, guided leaders in their decision making, and stood at the center of countless issues. To gain complete knowledge of an era, historians must investigate the religious context of what transpired, why it happened, and how. Yet too little is known about American Christianity's foreign policy opinions during the Cold and Vietnam Wars. To gain a deeper understanding of this period (1964-75), David E. Settje explores the diversity of American Christian responses to the Cold and Vietnam Wars to determine how Americans engaged in debates about foreign policy based on their theological convictions. Settje uncovers how specific Christian theologies and histories influenced American religious responses to international affairs, which varied considerably. Scrutinizing such sources as the evangelical "Christianity Today," the mainline Protestant, "Christian Century," a sampling of Catholic periodicals, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the United Church of Christ, "Faith and War" explores these entities' commingling of religion, politics, and foreign policy, illuminating the roles that Christianity attempted to play in both reflecting and shaping American foreign policy opinions during a decade in which global matters affected Americans daily and profoundly.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. A Vietnamese Moses is the story of Philiphê Binh, a Vietnamese Catholic priest who in 1796 traveled from Tonkin to the Portuguese court in Lisbon to persuade its ruler to appoint a bishop for his community of ex-Jesuits. Based on Binh’s surviving writings from his thirty-seven-year exile in Portugal, this book examines how the intersections of global and local Roman Catholic geographies shaped the lives of Vietnamese Christians in the early modern era. The book also argues that Binh’s mission to Portugal and his intense lobbying on behalf of his community reflected the agency of Vietnamese Catholics, who vigorously engaged with church politics in defense of their distinctive Portuguese-Catholic heritage. George E. Dutton demonstrates the ways in which Catholic beliefs, histories, and genealogies transformed how Vietnamese thought about themselves and their place in the world. This sophisticated exploration of Vietnamese engagement with both the Catholic Church and Napoleonic Europe provides a unique perspective on the complex history of early Vietnamese Christianity.

Postcolonial Vietnam has an urgent need for contextualized theology of mission, God, Christ, and the church that is rooted in indigenous cultural traditions and the dual Vietnamese spirit of resistance and assimilation. Dr KimSon Nguyen navigates the religio-cultural dimensions of Vietnamese spirituality and Daoism that have hindered the assimilation of the Christian faith in the Vietnamese context and explores a fresh approach to missiology in Vietnam. Dr Nguyen draws upon his deep knowledge of Vietnamese evangelical history to analyze contextualization and mission theology in Vietnam. He proposes an evangelical theology of God as Ðạo (way / 道), the centrality of the Vietnamese home as the “house of the Lord,” and ancestor veneration as a theological framework for an indigenous theology of the family. Narrowing the gap between culturally removed evangelical missionary practice and widespread syncretistic spirituality in Vietnam, Nguyen calls for a paradigm shift in Vietnamese mission theology that is both robustly evangelical and authentically Vietnamese.

The first systematic global study of how Christians respond to persecution, presenting new research by leading scholars of global Christianity.