Christian Interculture is an edited work priced for the library market and written for a high-level academic readership concerned with questions of historiography. Nevertheless, it is readable and rewarding. It is especially significant for the growing field of world Christianity, which is only beginning to grapple with subject-specific questions of method and theory. The volume tackles two pressing issues for studies of colonial Christianities and non-white postcolonial Christian communities and movements, namely, where to find Indigenous sources and how to read between the lines of colonial and missionary texts to discern native voices.

The bulk of the publication is made up of papers originally presented at a conference at Emory University in 2014. Those selected are of a uniformly high quality, and they have been woven together with both an introduction and a conclusion by Arun Jones. The editor's attention is especially on the “Christian interculture” of the title. The book illustrates not only the intercultural encounters of Indigenous peoples with Western missionaries but also the extent to which, in both colonial and postcolonial periods, local Christian communities outside the West are misrepresented and marginalized in similar ways, while at the same time, they are enabled by global interconnectedness to make contact with one another and build common ground. Another theme running through the volume is that the local people have agency and that, where this is not recognized, there is historical work to do to reveal it.

The nine main chapters are divided into three equal parts: “Methodological Reflections,” “Early Colonial Catholicism,” and “Christian Nationalism.” Although each chapter details results from research in a particular historical and regional context, it also includes self-conscious reflection on the actual doing of history. The editors and contributors share a desire to find marginalized characters and groups (Esther Mombo, Haruko Nawata Ward, J. J. Carney) and hear “native Christian” voices (Mrinalini Sebastian) in situations that were controlled by colonizers (Yanna Yannakakis, Adrian Hermann), missionaries (Paul Kollman), or local males (Mombo, Ward). The sources include not only mission archives and histories but also literature (Kenneth Mills), oral history (Christopher Vecsey), private correspondence, personal journals and diaries (Carney), records of court cases (Yannakakis), and periodicals (Hermann).

Highlights for this reader included Paul Kollman's opening essay, which is a rare resource showing how contemporary historical research methods can be applied in mission studies. Conversely, Kollman illustrates the wider historical importance of mission records and the added value of a researcher who understands the relevant missionary movement. Mrinalini Sebastian's thoughtful contribution shows how Spivak's subaltern may speak yet not be heard. Nevertheless, the choices made by the low and outcaste Indian communities she describes are a clear communication of their values. J. J. Carney's portrait of Bishop Aloys Bigirumwami shows how an Indigenous person had an “alternative vision of both ethnic discourse and Catholic politics” (215) in Rwanda, although tragically, it did not prevail. Christopher Vecsey points to “the greatest archive of Christian Indian source material: living American Indian peoples themselves” and suggests that historians should not be “too timid or circumscribed” but “go beyond the archives” and draw conclusions for the present day (178).

All the chapters demonstrate the complexity of intercultural relations. They go “beyond troublemakers and collaborators” (Kollman, chapter title), and other stereotypes and prejudices, to question assumptions about power relations and linear processes. In these intercultural encounters, the influence is reciprocal, the result is hybrid, and all parties are changed. There is no possibility of going back or of purging colonial influence, but the volume holds out hope that some one-sided records can be corrected as hitherto unheard voices and unseen actions are detected, however faintly, in historical records. This book lives up to its promotional claim that it will “inspire historians of World Christianity to critically interrogate—and imaginatively use—existing Western and indigenous documentary material in writing the history of Christianity in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.”