In a bold and complex book that refers to rigorous and close exegesis but progresses through cultivated intuition, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, locates himself—and asks his readers to place themselves—in a place at once secure and vulnerable, liminal and yet centered, the place at which traditions blur at their boundaries and insights grace us from all directions. I imagine that it can be an unsettling and off-putting read to anyone for whom faith is an undaunted rejection of multiple traditions and theology a xenologically bound discipline. But for those who look at the diversity of the human condition in wonderment and seek theological methods suitable for that diversity, it offers many lessons; these may be unsettling, but in a way that sharpens their own balance, and quickens their own search. The book as a whole seeks to provide a programmatic but grounded case for the discipline of comparative theology, which is in many ways a relatively recent field in the academy.

This dissertation tracks Jesuit discourse about suffering in the missions of Northern New Spain from the arrival of the first missionaries in the sixteeenth century until their expulsion in the eighteenth. This research project asked why tales of persecution became so prevalent in these borderland contexts and describes how missionaries sanctified their own sacrifices as well as native suffering through martyrological idioms. It argues that in both corporeal and textual forms missionaries were passionate in their efforts to pacify the northern frontier of Mexico. It also correlates colonial martyrologies to longer traditions of redemptive death in the history of Christianity. The belief that sacrifice begets growth reaches back to the biblical writers and church fathers like Jerome and Tertullian. More recently, Talal Asad has argued that “dying to give life” lies at the foundation of western civilization and its capacity for war. This dissertation charts a transitional moment in the longer geneaology of matyrological discourse that extends early Christian tales of persecution to the modern logic of redemptive sacrifice. It argues that Christian martyrdom traditions helped early modern Jesuits rationalize their participation in the Spanish colonization of the Americas and explain rebellion, disease, and death as providential.