Through its missionary, pedagogical, and scientific accomplishments, the Society of Jesus-known as the Jesuits-became one of the first institutions with a truly "global" reach, in practice and intention. The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits offers a critical assessment of the Order, helping to chart new directions for research at a time when there is renewed interest in Jesuit studies. In particular, the Handbook examines their resilient dynamism and innovative spirit, grounded in Catholic theology and Christian spirituality, but also profoundly rooted in society and cultural institutions. It also explores Jesuit contributions to education, the arts, politics, and theology, among others. The volume is organized in seven major sections, totaling forty articles, on the Order's foundation and administration, the theological underpinnings of its activities, the Jesuit involvement with secular culture, missiology, the Order's contributions to the arts and sciences, the suppression the Order endured in the 18th century, and finally, the restoration. The volume also looks at the way the Jesuit Order is changing, including becoming more non-European and ethnically diverse, with its members increasingly interested in engaging society in addition to traditional pastoral duties.

A provocative contribution to the history of early modern Euro-Asian interactions that provides new perspectives on the encounter between Catholicism and Hinduism in India. By focusing on the Jesuit missionary's discovery of Indian ""pagan"" Hinduism, Zupanov traces the stages of the Jesuit's disconcerting journey into religious relativism or accommodation. At every point of this Euro-Asian encounter, the emerging Catholic communities attempted to twist and turn their own received religion to fit their various collective and/or individual interests. This turning or ""troping"" of the Jesuit message into pre-Christian modes of religious expression produced the ""tropics"" of the title. Drawing upon a variety of sources in Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Latin and Tamil, ""Missionary Tropics"" documents the construction of the Indian vernacular Catholicism or ""Tropical Catholicism"" through a complex layering of missionary religious and social intentions and indigenous responses. By following Galenic humoral medical theory, the Catholic missionaries defined paganism as a natural outgrowth of the hot and humid climate. Reflecting the complex layering of the missionaries' religious and social intentions and the subsequent indigenous responses, this book should be of interest to all those who study religious encounters and are interested in the issues of religious conversion in the early modern world, in India, and elsewhere.