During his 1984 visit to Canada, Pope John Paul II declared, Christ, in the members of his body, is himself Indian. Who is this native Christ? What is his place in the spiritual universe of native people? Achiel Peelman examines these questions in this timely and groundbreaking book, which is the result of research he has carried out since 1982 in native communities across Canada. While Peelman's book is a work of theology and Christology, it is also a work of profound friendship that will help its readers know more deeply the Amerindian experience.

Indigenous People and the Christian Faith: A New Way Forward provides detailed historical, cultural and theological background and analysis to a very delicate and pressing subject facing many people around the world. The book is “glocal”: both local and global, as represented by international scholars. Every continent is represented by both Indigenous and non-indigenous people who desire to make a difference with the delicate problematics and relationships. The history of Indigenous people around the world is inextricably linked with Christianity and Colonialism. The book is completely interdisciplinary by employing historians, literary critics, biblical scholars and theologians, sociologists, philosophers and ordained engineers. The Literary Intent of the book, without presuming nor claiming too much for itself, is to provide practical thinking that will help all people move past the pain and dysfunction of the past, toward mutual understanding, communication, and practical actions in the present and future.

Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship between the WariÕ, inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the Evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission. Vila�a turns to a vast range of historical, ethnographic and mythological material related to both the WariÕ and missionaries perspectives and the authorÕs own ethnographic field notes from her more than 30-year involvement with the WariÕ community. Developing a close dialogue between the Melanesian literature, which informs much of the recent work in the Anthropology of Christianity, and the concepts and theories deriving from Amazonian ethnology, in particular the notions of openness to the other, unstable dualism, and perspectivism, the author provides a fine-grained analysis of the equivocations and paradoxes that underlie the translation processes performed by the different agents involved and their implications for the transformation of the native notion of personhood. Ê

Ten historians and anthropologists analyse religious change as it was experienced by Indigenous Peoples in and around the Pacific and southern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For centuries, Pentecostalism has played a significant role in oppressively shaping the life of formerly colonized people of Africa. Moreover, its theologies have perpetuated neocolonial policies developed through the lens of colonial legacies rooted in la mission civilizatrice (mission to civilize). However, since the 1980s, Neo-Pentecostalism is increasingly reshaping the Congolese Christendom. It sanctions the theologies of a prosperity gospel rooted in an uncritical reading of the Bible and self-theologizing informed by a lack of literal, contextual translation effects. This book argues that the prosperity gospel bankrupts its adherents—in this case, the vulnerable, impoverished sections of Sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly the Postcolonial Congo—and instead offers a balanced theological reflection that broadens Neo-Pentecostal studies with an African voice encouraging the rewriting and rereading of the story of redemptive mission. The research engages a paradigm shift within global missions and world Christianity, or the history of missions as the platform to negotiate literal, prophetic, and contextual translation and retransmission of the biblical gospel. It is critical to reclaim and reestablish a hermeneutic of mixed methodologies and construct a contextual and critical interpretation of the Bible in the Congo. To avoid the African assumption of cultural baggage, which affects how the Congolese interpret the Bible, the interpreter has to be neutral and experience the voice of Christ in the text instead of the voice of Congolese culture; they must be a prophetic voice to reconstruct the authentic meaning of the salvific story.

For over five hundred years, since the great age of exploration, Western Christians have visited, traded with, conquered and colonized large parts of the non-Western world. In virtually every case this contact has been accompanied by an attempt to spread Christianity. This volume explores the manner in which Western missionary Christianity has been shaped and transformed through contact with the peoples of Peru, Mexico, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China, and Japan. Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity demonstrates how local populations, who initially encountered Christianity as a mixture of religion, culture, politics, ethics and technology, selected those elements they felt suited their needs. The conversion of the local population, the volume shows, was usually accompanied by a significant indigenization of Christianity. Through the detailed examination and comparison of events in a range of countries and cultures, this book points provides a deeper understanding of mission history and the dynamics of Christianity's expansion. The encounter with Western Christianity is vital to the history of contact between Western and non-Western civilizations. Western Christians have visited, traded with, conquered and colonized large parts of the non-Western world for over five hundred years, and their migration has almost always been accompanied by an attempt to create new Christians in new lands. Just as indigenous people have been converted however, so too has Christianity become variously indigenized. Local populations initially encounter a Christian package of religion, culture, politics, ethics and technology. This volume illustrates the ways in which peoples have selected elements of this package to suit their specific needs, and so explores the myriad transformations missionary Christianity has undergone through contact with the peoples of Peru, Mexico, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and Japan. Contributing are Erik Cohen (University of Jerusalem), Yochanan Bar Yafe Szeminski ?, John F. Howes ?, D. Dennis Hudson ?, Daniel H. Bays (University of Kansas), and Eric Van Young (University of California, San Diego). The chapters are linked by their attempt to overcome conventional regional and disciplinary barriers in order to achieve a deeper understanding of mission history and the dynamics of the expansion of Christianity. A remarkable work, this volume will pave the way for entirely new approaches to a particularly complex and demanding subject.