Missions Begin with Blood
Suffering and Salvation in the Borderlands of New Spain
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Fordham University Press
Published:26th Oct '21
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Winner, 2022 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize
While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. Whether petitioning superiors for support, preparing to extirpate Native “idolatries,” or protecting their conversions from critics, Jesuits found power in their persecution and victory in their victimization. This book correlates these tales of sacrifice to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how martyrological idioms worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, missionaries invoked an agricultural metaphor that reconfigured suffering into seed that, when watered by sweat and blood, would one day bring a rich harvest of Indigenous Christianity.
- Winner of Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize 2022
ISBN: 9780823294206
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
288 pages