The early modern Japanese Church developed syncretistic practices in which Roman Catholicism came to function similarly to Buddhism and Shintō. This study examines the development of such practices, with particular focus on penitential rituals. It argues that certain of these rites were produced in the very early years of the mission through extensive discussions between European priests and Japanese Christians. They were compromises that were both hard-fought and intentional.

This article discusses the origins of ‘misión integral’ or integral mission, a term coined by the Ecuadorian theologian C. René Padilla (b. 1932). As the first critical study of Padilla, it argues that the origins of ‘misión integral’ are to be found within a cluster of political and social forces that were reshaping post-war Latin America: rural-urban migration, the resulting complications of urbanisation and the rapid expansion of the universities, where Marxist ideas of revolutionary change were of growing appeal to students. This article relies on interviews with many of the leading personalities involved, together with personal papers, archival research and Latin American census data.

This paper examines the process of radicalisation of Monsignor Ivan Illich during the 1960s, having as its setting Cuernavaca, Mexico – a creative, fluid space where Illich was in contact with Bishop Méndez Arceo, Erich Fromm and Gregorio Lemercier. Illich's writings and the reports from the centres led by him are placed here in context, and it is argued that his encounter with psychoanalysis in Cuernavaca shaped his critique of the Church as an institution. The radicalisation of his concept of the Church reached a high point with the publication of ‘The seamy side of charity’ and ‘The vanishing clergyman’, both in 1967.

Histories of the modern missionary movement frequently assert that converts were more successful missionaries than Europeans yet details of their work remain sparse. This article examines influential factors in the spread of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa in two ways. It explores the complex and variable processes through life sketches of the African missionaries, Bernard Mizeki, Leonard Kamungu and Apolo Kivebulaya, who worked with the Anglican mission agencies SPG, UMCA and CMS, respectively. It identifies common elements for further scrutiny including the role of travel, translation and communication, and the development of continental centres of Christianity and the trajectories between them and local hubs of mission activity. The transnational turn of contemporary history is employed and critiqued to scrutinise the relations between the local and global in order to comprehend the appeal of Christianity in the colonial era.