Product Description

A Spanish conquistador who posed as a sorcerer and cured native Americans as he trekked across an unknown wilderness; a French Jesuit who conjured rain clouds in order to impress his indigenous flock with the potency of Christian magic; a Puritan minister who healed a native chief in order to win him for God; a Mexican noble who was burned at the stake for resisting the gentle Franciscan friars; an Andean chief who was haunted by nightmares in which his native gods did battle with the Christian Father; a Huron magician who vied with French missionaries over spirits of the night in a shaking tent ceremony. These are a few of the individuals whose struggles are brought to life in the pages of this book. Their experiences, among others, reveal what happened when Christianity came into contact with Native American religions in three distinct regions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial America: Spanish, French and British.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #817779 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 452 pages

Customer Reviews

Unexpected contemporary relevance
The central theme of Sacred Dialogues - the interaction of Christianity and other religions - gives it immediate twenty-first century relevance. It's an intelligent book for an intelligent reader, but that does not mean it is dense or obscure. Its style is accessible, and the absence of a simple line narrative means that chapters can be read separately.
It's not only a history book but also a study of the psychology of religion. One fascinating aspect is the attitude of indigenous people towards Christian sacraments. For example, many believed that the waters of baptism could both transmit diseases to them, and also heal them physically.
The book shows that the political aspect of religion was not a monopoly of the conquerors. Native peoples had to consider whether to accept the new religion in order to curry favour with their conquerors, while simultaneously continuing to invoke their own gods and spirits; or whether to try - as some shamans or native healers did - to make use of Christian elements and introduce them into their own beliefs and practices.
The great paradox of the book, as Griffiths says, is that "the Indian face of God" originated not so much in the Christian evangelization as in the mixture of religions promoted by native peoples.

Highly recommended!
This book was really useful for background to my trip to Belize, I had my head buried in it before going. Its explanations of how Christianity and native religions merged were not only fascinating but gave a whole new dimension to my travels in the country, to places like Caracol and other Mayan sites. One particular Mayan guide was over the moon when I showed him this book. He was able to use it to make his tours even more informative and interesting. This book absolutely succeeds in its objective of bringing the subject alive for the general reader and for those who knew little or nothing about the subject before reading it. I only had a very basic knowledge of the colonizaton period before reading this but I am now hooked and eager to learn more. This is an approachable, accessible, intelligent and fascinating read.

A splendid work of synthesis and interpretation
This book is an impressive work of synthesis that presents the most recent scholarship on a complex subject to a wide readership while avoiding simplistic generalisations.

Its most innovative aspect is the insistence on the inadequacy of any analysis of religious interaction that centres upon the presentation and acceptance of a given set of doctrines. The author is aware that any such approach will tend to exaggerate differences and incompatibilities and to overstate doctrinal and ideological rigidities. Instead, Griffiths insists on the reciprocal nature of the interaction between Europeans and Amerindians, thereby unveiling the existence of an unofficial tradition that allowed the incorporation of indigenous elements into the rituals and ceremonies of Christianity and vice versa. Although both official Christianity and native religious leaders often deplored such developments, Griffiths demonstrates that it does not follow that the many unofficial manifestations that emerged were in any way marginal or even heterodox.

The symbiotic interplay between Christianity and native religions has not, until very recently, been adequately appreciated. Perhaps the main reason for this is the traditional tendency among historians to rely on evidence gathered from the writings and initiatives of missionaries, chroniclers, and other official documentation. But during the last two or three decades historians have succeeded in going beyond these sources and making use of the more sparsely documented contacts of Europeans of widely different backgrounds with indigenous peoples through previously neglected processes such as miscegenation, immigration and trade and, more significantly for Griffiths?s purpose, the comparatively unspectacular ministrations of itinerant preachers, healers and wonder-workers.

It is only recently that we have begun to appreciate that the lure that innumerable missionaries exerted over native peoples was often the direct result of their power as healers. Indeed, the way in which their ministrations were requested, in much the same way as those of former pagan healers or shamans, is a recurring trend. Much more than the distant bishops and secular priests, the presence of countless holy men seems to have impressed the native peoples with the sense of a new power that seemed stronger than the nature spirits of the local religious systems, but not for this reason dramatically different from their world-view or religious faith. In fact, these ministers often functioned as facilitators of new allegiances and patterns of observance; they embraced and gradually reduced to order a large number of conflicting systems of explanation.

Griffiths succeeds particularly well in his treatment of these recent findings in Spanish America. At first sight, the contrast with the North American case could not be more marked, since it seems that the Calvinist view of the predestination of the elect accustomed the Puritan mind to the idea that salvation was meant for an infinitesimal proportion of humanity. This attitude was in diametrical opposition to the liturgical character of Catholic Christianity. Hence the reasons why French and Spanish Catholic cultures should have shown a much stronger missionary spirit and a greater understanding of the native peoples than either the English or the Dutch Puritan colonists of the east coast.

Griffiths acknowledges that several studies insist that the Puritans emphasised the contrast between indigenous religions and Christianity by classing the former as devil worship and by adopting an attitude of marked cultural inflexibility. But he nevertheless points out that the Protestant colonists were in their way no less concerned with the problem of establishing a Christian society than were their Catholic contemporaries. He makes it clear that it is a mistake to regard the several forms of Puritanism as local variants of a single Calvinist model, for the official doctrine of the New England churches was based on the theory of non-separatist Congregationalism, which attempted to restore something of the traditional view of the dispensation of sacramental grace and the order of a visible church against the Calvinist doctrine of divine reprobation and election. This involved a belief in the practical law of justification for the saints, who enjoyed a large degree of freedom of choice and capacity to co-operate with divine grace.

The evidence gathered by Griffiths in his remarkable synthesis of recent research suggests that this ideal of founding a covenant-based community in America, which was a clearly defined purpose of the leaders of the great migrations of 1630, left more room for interaction with the native cultures than their strict Puritanism would seem to indicate.

There are, therefore, many more aspects in common between the Puritan and the Catholic experiences. Griffiths brings these coincidences out clearly in an impressive work of scholarship that will be of enormous value to anyone interested in the recent revisionist approaches to evangelisation and processes of acculturation and cultural and religious interaction.

Dr Fernando Cervantes
Senior Lecturer in History
University of Bristol