The Church of the Dead : : The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas / / Jennifer Scheper Hughes.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2021 English
• VerfasserIn: Hughes, Jennifer Scheper,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: North American Religions ; 11
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 25 b/w illustrations

Tells the story of the founding of American Christianity against the backdrop of devastating disease, and of the Indigenous survivors who kept the nascent faith aliveMany scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its early period it was very much on the brink of failure. In 1576, Indigenous Mexican communities suffered a catastrophic epidemic that took almost two million lives and simultaneously left the colonial church in ruins. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of Christianity in the Americas. The Church of the Dead offers a counter-history of American Christian origins. It centers the power of Indigenous Mexicans, showing how their Catholic faith remained intact even in the face of the faltering religious fervor of Spanish missionaries. While the Europeans grappled with their failure to stem the tide of death, succumbing to despair, Indigenous survivors worked to reconstruct the church. They reasserted ancestral territories as sovereign, with Indigenous Catholic states rivaling the jurisdiction of the diocese and the power of friars and bishops. Christianity in the Americas today is thus not the creation of missionaries, but rather of Indigenous Catholic survivors of the colonial mortandad, the founding condition of American Christianity. Weaving together archival study, visual culture, church history, theology, and the history of medicine, Jennifer Scheper Hughes provides us with a fascinating reexamination of North American religious history that is at once groundbreaking and lyrical.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Note on Translations -- Preface: Mortandad: Requiem -- Introduction: Ecclesia ex mortuis: Mexican Elegy and the Church of the Dead -- Part I: Ave Verum Corpus Abject Matter and Holy Flesh -- 1. Theologia Medicinalis: Medicine as Sacrament of the Mortandad -- 2. Corpus Coloniae Mysticum: Indigenous Bodies and the Body of Christ -- Part II: Roads to Redemption and Recovery: Cartographies of the Christian Imaginary -- 3. Walking Landscapes of Loss after the Mortandad: Spectral Geographies in a Ruined World -- 4. Hoc est enim corpus meum/This Is My Body: Cartographies of an Indigenous Catholic Imaginary after the Mortandad -- Conclusion. The Church of the Living: Toward a Counterhistory of Christianity in the Americas -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author