Day 9. September 20, 2006
Movement 1. Dei Filius
Lecture 4. Jesus Comes to America: New Spain, New France and New England (Part 2)
Lecture 5. Father and Son: Jesus, the Puritans and Their Heirs (Part 1)
A segment of the film The Mission illustrates the impulses and challenges shaping the Catholic Jesus in the New World's southern hemisphere. Catholic outreach across the New World was followed by Protestant missions concentrated especially in New England, offering like Franciscans and Jesuits the salvific gift of Jesus to all souls. Calvinist settlers offered Native Americans Jesus the Word, a figure quite different from Catholicism's Jesus the Body. The intellectualism of Calvinism's focus on the Word proved an insuperable obstacle to Protestant efforts to convert Native Americans. The idea of predestination - that God has predetermined who will be saved and who will be damned - particularly befuddled Puritan missionary efforts and ultimately itself did not survive the religious marketplace that took root in the New World.