In 1492, civilizations entirely unknown to one another dramatically confronted their differences along a line that eventually extended from Nova Scotia to Tierra del Fuego. Over three centuries, the religious, political, and economic pressures of Europe motivated a nearly complete cultural sweep over the entire Western Hemisphere. In Christianity Comes to the Americas, three distinguished historians retell, from the vantage point of the latest historical scholarship, the story that began in late medieval Western Europe and came to a conclusive turning point near the end of the eighteenth century. Stafford Poole brings to life the entire movement of Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores, mendicants, and missionaries throughout South and Central America, the Caribbean, Florida, Mexico, and the American Southwest. The accomplishments and anguish of such figures as Bartolome de las Casas, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Antonio Vieira, and Juan de Zumarraga, among others, take center stage over the exploits of Pizarro, Cortez, Balboa, and Coronado. Robert Choquette tracks the French Catholic missionaries who crisscrossed the American continent, including Jesuit martyrs and Saint Marguerite Bourgeois of the St. Lawrence River Valley. He tells of missionaries shooting rapids and driving dog teams in America's vast hinterland and of Brother Andre performing miracle cures in Montreal's St. Joseph's Oratory. Charles H. Lippy follows the reform movements of Calvin and Luther as they extended to the settlements all along the Atlantic coastline. Lippy's narrative traces the dilemma of Puritan covenant ideology personified in the lives of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, the vicissitudes of the colonial Anglican church, and the contributions of Quakers like William Penn, who bridged the ideals of Puritanism and the ideals of the Enlightenment. Christianity Comes to the Americas tells a complex story of grand ambition, great tragedy, and selfless humanitarianism. We see the visionary ideals of fervent men and women, the conflicts between soldiers and missionaries, and the sometimes brutal clash between colonizers and colonized over practices of nudity, cannibalism, torture, family relationships, worship, and conversion. All three historians write sensitively of the twentieth century issues spawned by colonial practices: slavery and ethnic persecution, ecological imbalance, isolationism, xenophobia, and regional independence, Christianity Comes to the Americas is solid, comprehensive history presented here in a single, masterful work.
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