Winner, 2022 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. Whether petitioning superiors for support, preparing to extirpate Native “idolatries,” or protecting their conversions from critics, Jesuits found power in their persecution and victory in their victimization. This book correlates these tales of sacrifice to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how martyrological idioms worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, missionaries invoked an agricultural metaphor that reconfigured suffering into seed that, when watered by sweat and blood, would one day bring a rich harvest of Indigenous Christianity.

Wanting a simpler lifestyle, away from the drama of a heated divorce, and to have an escape from the stress of a military career, Mark moves to a ranch. Hope Ranch is owned and operated by a friend and her ranch hands. He quickly becomes accustomed to the lifestyle and finds peace in the many jobs a ranch has to offer. But when strange attacks and events start happening in the area, Mark learns that the world is starting to fall apart. With mankind’s existence threatened, Mark and his group find out that simply living isn’t the only thing at risk, and even though he is a little more prepared than others, some dangers aren’t what they expect in the new world they must survive in.

In 2011 the Maryknoll Fathers & Brothers celebrated one hundred years of mission work in more than forty countries around the world. These essays describe the achievements, and failures, of the past and the challenges and rewards that mission outreach experiences today in our world of pluralism, and it probes into the future of mission and the changing nature of that mission. Included among the many contributors are Cardinal Francis George, Robert Schreiter, Peter Phan, Dana Robert, and Bishop Ricardo Ramirez. Complete texts of the plenaries by Maryknoll representatives and invited speakers are included and summaries are presented by leaders of a number of break-out sessions. Among the latter are Barbara Reid, Daniel Groody, Ana Maria Pineda, and many others.

The only things Ashley St. James has ever allowed herself to love are her dogs. A child of the foster care system, she never even knew her own birthday.