Since the sixteenth century, Ethiopian Orthodox Chris-tianity and the indigenous religions of Ethiopia have been confronted with, and influenced by, numerous Catholic and Protestant missions. This book offers historical, anthropological and personal analyses of these encounters. The discussion ranges from the Jesuit debate on circumcision to Oromo Bible translation, from Pentecostalism in Addis Ababa to conversion processes among the Nuer. Juxtaposing past and present, urban and rural, the book breaks new ground in both religious and African studies. Verena Bll and Evgenia Sokolinskaia are researchers at the department of African and Ethopian Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute, University of Hamburg. Steven Kaplan is professor of African Studies and Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In the rural plateaux of northern Ethiopia, one can still find scattered ruins of monumental buildings that are evidently alien to the country's ancient architectural tradition. This little-known and rarely studied architectural heritage is a silent witness to a fascinating if equivocal cultural encounter that took place in the 16th-17th centuries between Catholic Europeans and Orthodox Ethiopians. The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art presents a selection of papers derived from the 5th Conference on the History of Ethiopian Art, which for the first time systematically approached this heritage. The book explores the enduring impact of this encounter on the artistic, religious and political life of Ethiopia, an impact that has not been readily acknowledged, not least because the public conversion of the early 17th-century Emperor Susïnyus to Catholicism resulted in a bloody civil war shrouded in religious intolerance. Bringing together work by key researchers in the field, these studies open up a particularly rich period in the history of Ethiopia and cast new light on the complexities of cultural and religious (mis)encounters between Africa and Europe.

Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity constitutes an exceptional religious tradition flourishing in sub-Saharan Africa already since late antiquity. The volume places Ethiopian Orthodoxy into a global context and explores the various ways in which it has been interconnected with the wider Christian world from the Aksumite period until today. By highlighting the formative role of both wide-ranging translocal religious interactions as well as disruptions thereof, the contributors challenge the perception of this African Christian tradition as being largely isolated in the course of its history. Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity in a Global Context: Entanglements and Disconnections offers a new perspective on the Horn of Africa’s Christian past and reclaims its place on the map of global Christianity.

Based on doctoral thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007.

This book presents an early modern Jesuit attitude towards Hindu and Ethiopian strains of asceticism. The Jesuits’ descriptions of both the yogis and the Ethiopian renunciates were marked by ambivalence. While critical of these ascetics, the missionaries also pointed out admirable facets of their comportment. In both the Society of Jesus’ positive and negative impressions, there are glaring ethnocentric views that shift the spotlight onto the other’s flaws. Like many historical cases, these perceptions evolved into a sort of inverted mirror image of the self that revealed differences between the European Catholic and the native renunciate.

The papers collected in this volume explore the strategies through which Christian authorities throughout the early medieval world both established and expressed their social position, while at the same time drawing attention to the moments when those same processes were resisted and challenged. Where previous studies of Christianisation have for the most part approached the issue of dissent through the continued existence of paganism and the various Christian heresies, this volume suggests that the experience of doubt towards, and articulation of resistance to, the claims of Christian leaders extended far outside the circles of pagan intellectuals and dissident theologians. The result is a view of Christianisation as far more piecemeal, complex and incomplete than has often been acknowledged. Contributors include Peter Turner, Peter Kritzinger, Collin Garbarino, Philip Wood, Ralph Lee, Richard Payne, Mike Humphreys, Giorgia Vocino, and Gerda Heydemann.