Amazon.com description: Product Description: This volume explores the ways in which Christianity has been experienced, understood, and expressed by mostly non-western people. It is interested in its vernacular express, seeking to understand the tensions between belief and practice that have been inherent in Christianity since the beginning. It seeks to demonstrate the contexts in which Christianity has been accepted by a variety of people in different historical epochs not necessarily as organically whole, but as partial elements, themes, symbols, and practices that have been embraced by particular cultures, civilizations, ethnic class or interest groups, at particular times. The authors, who have been inspired by Godfrey Lienhardt s work and courses in the anthropology of religion, survey vernacular Christianities in the old Christian world (Greece, Spain, Italy, medieval Nubia); the redefinitions that took place in the nineteenth century as a result of European expansion; and the variety of contexts in which Christianity was appropriated by African peoples in modern times.