Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion Hardback - 2004

"This is truly a multidisciplinary work. Reinders raises profound questions about how people from one culture view people in another. The materials Reinders richly mines in this book reveal to a Western readership so much about itself. Skillful and crisp, Borrowed Gods is extremely well written, and will no doubt appeal to an audience of students, scholars, and lay readers alike."--John Berthrong, Boston University School of Theology, author of All Under Heaven: Transforming Paradigms in Confucian-Christian Dialogue

"Eric Reinders's Borrowed Gods testifies to the vitality of recent works on the study of Chinese religion. Especially exciting is Reinders's fascinating, and at times quite humorous, dissection of the Protestant missionary enterprise in China -- strong evidence that the much neglected and trivialized history of nineteenth-century missionaries is finally starting to receive its due. Engagingly well written and theoretically sophisticated, this is a study that is brilliantly and viscerally insightful about both our knowledge of China and that peculiar missionary body of Western interlopers. Most of all, this is a work that significantly contributes to a more subtle and nuanced approach to intracultural understanding."--Norman Girardot, University Distinguished Professor, Lehigh University