The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas
Jennifer Scheper Hughes
Aug 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Laural Merlington
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8 hr 38 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
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 alive Many 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.
About the author
Jennifer Scheper Hughes is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present.
Laural Merlington has recorded well over one hundred audiobooks and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards, including one for Never Say Die by Susan Jacoby.
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