Robert J. Schreiter brings together acute analyses of the Christian world mission agenda by astute observers of both church and world. In six chapters -- including Schreiter's own essay on a new ecumenical catholicity and a seventh by him on the status of the global Christian mission agenda, focusing especially on the Catholic role in mission -- the reader is taken on a trip that reveals how globalization entails both local and international responses.

In Between Popes, Inquisitors and Princes Jessica Dalton uses extensive, original archival research to provide the first history of a unique and controversial papal privilege that allowed the first Jesuits to absolve heretics in sixteenth-century Italy without involving bishops or inquisitors. Dalton uses the story of this remarkable privilege to reconsider two central aspects of Jesuit history: their role in the Counter-Reformation and their relationship with the papacy. She convincingly argues that, in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, the Jesuits were valued collaborators of popes, inquisitors and princes not for their obedience and subservience but rather because they worked with an autonomy and flexibility that allowed them to convert heretics where political barriers and popular hostility hindered inquisitors and prelates.

In Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century, Margherita Trento explores the process by which the Jesuit missionary Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680-1747), in collaboration with a group of local lay elites identified by their profession as catechists, chose Tamil poetry as the social and political language of Catholicism in eighteenth-century South India. Trento analyzes a corpus of Tamil grammars and poems, chiefly Beschi's Tempavani, alongside archival documents to show how, by presenting themselves as poets and intellectuals, Catholic elites gained a persuasive voice as well as entrance into the learned society of the Tamil country and its networks of patronage. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840879.