| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Spiritual Encounters: Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America. Ed. by Nicholas Griffiths and Fernando Cervantes. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. xii, 304 pp. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-8032-7081-X.)

Nicholas Griffiths and Fernando Cervantes, well known for their work on Spanish colonial religious history, have assembled a strong multidisciplinary collection of essays in which the contributors illuminate the diverse native responses to Christian evangelization in early America. While weighted toward Spanish America, the essays treat not only the core areas of Meso and South America but also peripheral zones such as northern New Spain, Panama, and New Granada. Moreover, areas of French and English influences also receive attention, thereby affording a comparative perspective from which to ponder the meaning of those spiritual encounters. 1

Griffiths opens with an excellent historiographic overview of the interpretive paradigms that over the past half century have held sway in this branch of colonial religious history. Moving beyond the "spiritual conquest," resistance, and syncretism models, the latest scholarship now emphasizes the "reciprocal, albeit asymmetrical, exchange" of spiritual values between Europeans and natives. In their own ways, the contributing scholars follow that mode of examining cultural flow, characterized as "interaction down a two-way street, in which there was less 'conversion' than 'conversation.'" The essays reveal both the variety and the complexity of those conversations. . . .

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