Books: Encounters of the Spirit

Richard W. Pointer's excellent book is a collection of several chapters all in service of a basic thesis: "the European and the Native American in the course of their encounter had each altered each other's religious life, not in duplicate manners or to comparable degrees but nevertheless in identifiable ways" (p. 2).

He notes that this is not a particularly shocking thesis--of course colonial contact led to two-way exchanges. In spite of what should be obvious, this is a relatively new area of scholarly attention. My own dissertation about exchange of religious and folk healing practices in the borderlands will comprise another chapter in this new history.