Ancestral Feeling

The language of heritage permeates Scripture, encouraging Christians to approach church history like a family history. But the notion of ancestry also constrains the world’s Catholics and Protestants to trace their confessional descent from Europe, rendering them perpetual latecomers in the historical chain. "Ancestral Feeling" systematically diagnoses the postcolonial problems generated by an ancestral outlook. But, applying critical theories in cultural studies to the study of church history, the book experiments with ways that the Western Christian inheritance can awaken the memory of one’s own ancestors. Writing a personal reflection on her family’s history in British-ruled Hong Kong, Renie Chow Choy engages autobiographically with England’s ecclesiastical art, architecture, music, and literature, in order to affirm her attachment to a heritage normally associated with English national identity. For global and immigrant Christians brought into a relationship with English Christianity by colonialism but are bypassed by its history, this book makes a bold declaration: England’s Christian heritage is also our story.

“A superb book: hopeful, eloquent and timely. Skilfully weaving personal narrative with variegated threads of scholarship, Renie Choy crafts a heartfelt case for an inclusive approach to English Christian heritage and our ancestral past, to find in both a home with many mansions.”, "Remarkable and rewarding. A brave and complex book that ought to be essential reading not only for anyone interested in postcolonialism but for everyone who cares about the history and future of Christianity.”, “Choy traces Christian experiences from the bottom-up: from the Christians of past European colonies and other latecomers to the Western Christian tradition who find an inexplicable and sometimes conflicted sense of recognition when visiting Europe. Choy's personal reflections provoke fruitful thought for Christians hailing from places peripheral to Europe who still find it a spiritual homeland for their faith.”, “This pioneering book discusses the structure of ancestral feelings through the postcolonial lenses of nostalgia and amnesia, roots and routes, ambivalence and dissonance, identity and identification, and affinity and affiliation. I highly recommend it to faculty, students, and the general public who want to interpret English Christian heritage from postcolonial and global perspectives.”

Renie Chow Choy is Lecturer in Church History at St Mellitus College. She has published on various aspects of early medieval Christianity, and is the author of Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford University Press). She is currently working on inclusive memory in the interpretation of England’s historic churches.