Product Overview
The language of heritage permeates Scripture, encouraging Christians to
approach church history like a family history. But the notion of
ancestry also constrains the world’s Catholics and Protestants to trace
their confessional descent from Europe, rendering them perpetual
latecomers in the historical chain. ↵
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"Ancestral
Feeling" systematically diagnoses the postcolonial problems generated
by an ancestral outlook. But, applying critical theories in cultural
studies to the study of church history, the book experiments with ways
that the Western Christian inheritance can awaken the memory of one’s
own ancestors. ↵
↵
Writing
a personal reflection on her family’s history in British-ruled Hong
Kong, Renie Chow Choy engages autobiographically with England’s
ecclesiastical art, architecture, music, and literature, in order to
affirm her attachment to a heritage normally associated with English
national identity. For global and immigrant Christians brought into a
relationship with English Christianity by colonialism but are bypassed
by its history, this book makes a bold declaration: England’s Christian
heritage is also our story.
Renie Chow Choy is Lecturer in Church History at St Mellitus College.
She has published on various aspects of early medieval Christianity, and
is the author of Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time
of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford University Press). She is currently
working on inclusive memory in the interpretation of England’s historic
churches.