Cross-Cultural Heritage: Critical Approaches to Missionary Legacies

The diverging forms of material and immaterial missionary heritages and legacies.

For centuries, Christian missions have intervened in local religious communities, practices and ideas across the globe, generating encounters between Indigenous and Western cultures that have ranged from hostile confrontation to intercultural osmosis. While primarily intended as a strategy for evangelisation, forms of inculturation also led to the emergence of new hybrid cultural and religious expressions. These creative processes were rarely unidirectional; instead, they involved reciprocal cultural transactions in which local communities exerted significant agency.

Cross-Cultural Heritage deepens our understanding of the intricate relationships between missions and missionised communities. These are reflected in the material and immaterial legacies of missionary histories in various contexts in South America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe. Often, they remain deeply rooted in landscapes, memories and practices today.

Contributing authors: Paola Granado (Université Lumière Lyon 2), Leah Abayao (University of the Philippines Baguio), Kwami Edem Afoutou (Université Laval), Karen Jacobs (University of East Anglia), Naziru Yahaya Shu’Aibu (College of Advance and Remedial Studies, Kano), Leon Bouwmeester (KU Leuven), Jennifer Bond (University College London), Rinald D’Souza (KU Leuven), Markus A. Scholz (Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen Frankfurt am Main), Idesbald Goddeeris (KU Leuven).

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Jonas Van Mulder is a research associate and curator at KADOC Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society of KU Leuven.

Thomas Coomans is a full professor of architectural history and built heritage conservation at KU Leuven and director of the Advanced Master in Conservation of Monuments and Sites (RLICC), at the Faculty of Engineering Science.

Dries Vanysacker is professor of history of Church and Theology at KU Leuven and head of the Study and Documentation Centre Capuchins in the Low Countries.