J. C. Howard

When God Arrived With a Government: When Salvation Required Surrender and Christianity Policed the Soul

An interpretive historical essay examining Portuguese Goa as a case in which evangelization operated within a colonial state able to alter sacred space, civil status, language, memory, and the terms of religious choice. Moving from the conquest of 1510 and Francis Xavier's reques...

The Cross Before the Flag: Christianity, Colonialism, and Japan's Refusal

This essay rereads Japan’s suppression of Christianity as a collision between two coercive structures: a transoceanic religious-commercial order capable of entering conscience before territorial conquest, and a consolidating state that answered perceived danger with surveillance,...

When God Arrived With a Government: When Salvation Required Surrender and Christianity Policed the Soul

An interpretive historical essay examining Portuguese Goa as a case in which evangelization operated within a colonial state able to alter sacred space, civil status, language, memory, and the terms of religious choice. Moving from the conquest of 1510 and Francis Xavier's reques...