The Unbelieved and historians, part III : Responses and Elaborations

The first two parts of "The Unbelieved" argued for the possibility of the existence of supernatural beings and for their agency in historical writing. This instalment is a roundtable assessing the problems and potential in the category of the Unbelieved and in its knowability. Space limitations prevented our following the rich avenues of further inquiry our extraordinary peer reviewers suggested, but we remain grateful, especially for their reminders of the complexity of motivations of historians who avoid the Unbelieved and their emphasis on the importance of humility as a historian's tool

The Early-Modern Jesuit Missions as a Global Movement

The traditional historiography of the early-modern Jesuits, ironically, has relied on the order's perceived centralization in order to treat the actual missions in a decentralized fashion. Under the assumption that the impressive normative documents of the Society immediately corresponded to a system of regional missions directed effectively from Rome, historians have too often been content to write local studies of what they assumed to be a global phenomenon. By contesting the Society’s seamless centralization, this project argues for the importance of tracing non-normative, horizontal connections between regional missions with the ultimate goal of an accurate global history of the Jesuit institutions. The vast distances separating the missions led to logistical problems of transportation and communication incompatible with the ideal view of the Society of Jesus as a tightly centralized and smoothly running military machine. This paper first summarizes my findings by describing the variety of connections unmediated by Rome that sprung up between the missions in Germany, Mexico, and China. It then discusses the role world-systems analysis has played in inspiring this research. Traditional accounts of the Jesuit missions devote discrete chapters to each region, without showing how they all fit together. Reading economic history encouraged the pursuit of connections between these regional missions. This paper concludes with a consideration of two alternate historiographical frameworks for non-economic global phenomena: institutional world history and globalization theory

Merchants, migrants, missionaries, and globalization in the early-modern Pacific

In 1571 the founding of Manila made possible regular transpacific trade and thus forged the missing link in the global trade network. American interest in China and Japan soared to new heights. In the next two centuries this attraction fuelled other globalizing exchanges parallel to the commercial ties across the Pacific. Thousands crossed the ocean to create the America s first Asian diaspora communities, and Mexico became Europe s clearinghouse for information about Asia. The most intense connection was missionary, for churchmen in America worked with one eye relentlessly turned to East Asia and dreamed of the possibility of evangelization, and of its alluring dangers. These exchanges, and the attendant expanding mental horizons, evince enough similarities with modern globalization to warrant incorporation into that concept.

SESSION 1.3: A Thai Forest Buddhist Monastery in a British Columbian Forest: Religion and Diversity in the Birkenhead Valley

In June 1994, the Venerable Sona (ne Tom West), a Coquitlam, BC-born-and-bred Buddhist monk from the orthodox Thai Forest Tradition of Theravada Buddhism, traveled from the Sri Lankan Buddhist temple in Surrey to a complex of rundown shacks on the road between Mount Currie and D’Arcy in the Birkenhead River valley near Pemberton, BC. There, he succeeded in establishing the first North American foothold of the Thai Forest tradition, which has spread globally to become the most successful Theravada monastic order outside Asia. In order for this strict form of Buddhist monasticism to take root a group of people with widely divergent backgrounds, religious and otherwise, had to intersect to serve the mendicant monks. Those who fed and otherwise sustained them included regular visitors from Vancouver – Thai Buddhist graduate students and domestic workers, as well as Sri Lankan and “convert” Buddhist professionals and academics – along with local people – non-Buddhist foresters, entrepreneurs, self-described hippies and dropouts, and a Baptist school secretary. These interactions didn’t happen in the cosmopolitan environs of a global city, like Vancouver, but rather in a rural and reputedly “redneck” place, where the Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhists who visited encountered an intensely foreign cultural and physical environment surrounding the familiar robes and rituals of a Buddhist monastery. By examining this understudied periphery we can challenge literatures that bind diversity to the urban and keep convert and ethnic Buddhists apart; we hope to use this case study to contribute to a conversation about religion, identity, and the intersections that have allowed Buddhism to become a potent cultural force in North America, and particularly in BC

SFU History Reads: Martin Luther

This year is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther\u27s "95 Theses" ("Disputation on the Power of Indulgences"). To mark the occasion, Roxanne Panchasi and SFU\u27s history department are facilitating a reading and discussion event centred around Lyndal Roper\u27s book Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. SFU HISTORY READS is a public book club that intends to examine Roper\u27s take on Luther\u27s life and work. Co-sponsored by SFU\u27s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, the event will feature a panel of esteemed professors Luke Clossey, John Craig, Emily O\u27Brien, and Tiffany Werth from SFU English, with Roxanne Panchasi acting as moderator. ABOUT THE BOOK This definitive biography reveals the complicated inner life of the founding father of the Protestant Reformation, whose intellectual assault on Catholicism ushered in a century of upheaval that transformed Christianity and changed the course of world history. On October 31, 1517, so the story goes, a shy monk named Martin Luther nailed a piece of paper to the door of the Castle Church in the university town of Wittenberg. The ideas contained in these Ninety-five Theses, which boldly challenged the Catholic Church, spread like wildfire. Within two months, they were known all over Germany. So powerful were Martin Luther’s broadsides against papal authority that they polarized a continent and tore apart the very foundation of Western Christendom. Luther’s ideas inspired upheavals whose consequences we live with today. But who was the man behind the Ninety-five Theses? Lyndal Roper’s magisterial new biography goes beyond Luther’s theology to investigate the inner life of the religious reformer who has been called “the last medieval man and the first modern one.” Here is a full-blooded portrait of a revolutionary thinker who was, at his core, deeply flawed and full of contradictions. Luther was a brilliant writer whose biblical translations had a lasting impact on the German language. Yet he was also a strident fundamentalist whose scathing rhetorical attacks threatened to alienate those he might persuade. He had a colorful, even impish personality, and when he left the monastery to get married (“to spite the Devil,” he explained), he wooed and wed an ex-nun. But he had an ugly side too. When German peasants rose up against the nobility, Luther urged the aristocracy to slaughter them. He was a ferocious anti-Semite and a virulent misogynist, even as he argued for liberated human sexuality within marriage. A distinguished historian of early modern Europe, Lyndal Roper looks deep inside the heart of this singularly complex figure. The force of Luther’s personality, she argues, had enormous historical effects—both good and ill. By bringing us closer than ever to the man himself, she opens up a new vision of the Reformation and the world it created and draws a fully three-dimensional portrait of its founder