Christopher Joby, "Christian Mission in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan: A Reception History of Texts, Beliefs, and Practices" (Brill, 2025)

New Books in Religion · Sep 19, 2025 · 1h 3m

How do new ideas and beliefs take root when they cross cultural and linguistic borders? In seventeenth-century Taiwan, both Dutch and Spanish missionaries tried to replace Indigenous gods, practices, and laws with their own Christian traditions. Christopher Joby’s Christian Mission in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan: A Reception History of Texts, Beliefs, and Practices (Brill, 2025) explores this moment in history through a new lens: reception. Rather than focusing only on what missionaries brought, he looks at how Indigenous communities responded. Central to the story are experiments in…