Description: This book examines the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire and colonial Mexico.
Brief description: Daniel T. Reff is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is an anthropologist and enthnohistorian who has done research in northern Mexico, the American Southwest, Spaink and Portugal. He is the author of several articles on colonial Mexico in such journals as American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, and Ethnohistory. He is the author of Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518-1764 (1991). He has been a resident scholar at the School of American Research and is the recipient of major research grants as well as a University Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Review Quotes: "One thousand years apart, Christianity's rapid rise in Europe and in Mexico coincided with plague and social dislocation, but this was no coincidence. Crossing disciplines with apparent ease, Daniel Reff offers a fresh, erudite, and compelling explanation of how Jesuit missionaries in Mexico advanced their cause by echoing the rhetoric and strategies of early Christians." David J. Weber, author of The Spanish Frontier in North America and the forthcoming, Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment