This book highlights the faith of the Tongan Saints from contact with our first missionaries in 1891 until the centennial commemoration held in Tonga in 1991, with an epilogue that will highlight events until the present. At that centennial commemoration, rain fell upon the Tonga Saints, and so did revelation from the mouth of Apostle Russell M. Nelson. After thanking the congregation for their "great example as Latter-day Saints," he pronounced a blessing upon the local Church members, "that from this island kingdom, faith may radiate through the entire world and affect the lives of people all over the world."
For thirteenth-century preacher, exorcist, and hagiographer Thomas of Cantimpré, the Southern Low Countries were a harbinger of the New Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit, he believed, was manifesting itself in the lives of lay and religious people alike. Thomas avidly sought out these new kinds of saints, writing accounts of their lives so that these models of sanctity might astound, teach, and trouble the convictions of his day. In Excessive Saints, Rachel J. D. Smith combines historical, literary, and theological approaches to offer a new interpretation of Thomas’s hagiographies, showing how they employ vivid narrative portrayals of typically female bodies to perform theological work in a rhetorically specific way. Written in an era of great religious experimentation, Thomas’s texts think with and through the bodies of particular figures: the narrative of the holy person’s life becomes a site of theological invention in a variety of registers, particularly the devotional, the mystical, and the dogmatic. Smith examines how these texts represent the lives and bodies of holy women to render them desirable objects of devotion for readers and how Thomas passionately narrates these lives even as he works through his uncertainties about the opportunities and dangers that these emerging forms of holiness present. Excessive Saints is the first book to consider Thomas’s narrative craft in relation to his theological projects, offering new visions for the study of theology, medieval Christianity, and medieval women’s history.
The life of Tonga Toutai Pāletu'a. The son of a minister from the Church of Tonga joins the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He faithfully serves and is the first Tongan to be called as a patriarch, stake president, mission president, and temple president in the kingdom of Tonga.
This first-person account tells the fascinating story of the three years Elder Groberg spent on the islands in the South Pacific amidst a kindly people who had a deep faith in God, a faith that provides the backdrop for Elder Groberg's accounts of miraculous healings, protective warnings, and perilous voyages; for such stories as: The emergancy night voyage on a turbulent sea, and the anxious search for the only guiding light into the destination harbor. The boy whose apparently lifeless body was handed to the missionaries with the words, "Here, make him well again you have the power." The storm that overturned the boat, throwing missionaries into the raging sea. The hurricane that hit the little island. The hunger when the usual supply boat failed to show up. And much, much more. This remarkable book paints a vivid picture of missionary life in a society geared to "a different way of thinking."
First published in 1974, Church and State in Tonga is a classic study of the formative period of modern Tongan history. The years covered are from the re-establishment of the Wesleyan Methodist mission in the 1820s until the promulgation of the Tongan constitution in 1875. The missionaries assumed the role of political advisors, but by the 1850s the missionary monopoly was undermined and what author Sione Latukefu calls a "marriage of convenience" and an "alliance" began. The king became selective in the advice he accepted and took his own initiatives. Much of the book deals with the development of kingship and the emergence of written codes of law and the constitution. The book is dedicated to Queen Salote Tupou III who passed the traditions of the royal family to Latukefu, determined to impart her wealth of knowledge of the Tongan traditional past. Church and State in Tonga was the first substantial study by a Tongan of the history of the Tongan monarchy and government, a rich documentary study reinforced by knowledge of local language, customs, and traditions.
In 1894 a Muslim mystic named Muḥammad al-Kattānī abandoned his life of asceticism to preach Islamic revival and jihad against the French. Ten years later, he mobilized a Moroccan resistance against French colonization. This book narrates the story of al-Kattānī and his virtual disappearance from accounts of modern Moroccan history.
Winner, 2024 Patrick D. Hanan Prize for Translation, Association for Asian Studies In the first half of the eighteenth century, rival dynasties of Naqshbandi Sufi shaykhs vied for influence in the Tarim Basin, part of present-day Xinjiang. In the 1750s, the collapse of the Junghar Mongol state gave one branch of this family an opportunity to assert their independence in the oasis cities of Kashgar and Yarkand. Others sided with the armies of the Qing dynasty, which were massing on the frontiers to invade. The ensuing conflict saw the region incorporated into the expanding Qing imperium. Three decades afterward, Muḥammad Ṣadiq Kashghari was commissioned to write an account of these Naqshbandi Sufis and their downfall. Blending the genres of collective biography and historical epic, mixing prose and verse, Kashghari’s text vividly depicts religious and political conflicts on the eve of the Qing conquest. It became the most popular and influential Chaghatay-language work to grapple with this divisive period. This volume presents the complete, long recension of In Remembrance of the Saints, translated for the first time into any Western language and extensively annotated with reference to both Islamic and Qing sources. The introduction situates the work in the Inner Asian tradition of Sufi biography and discusses the political factors shaping historical memory in Qianlong-era Xinjiang. Providing a rare local perspective on China’s expansion into Muslim borderlands, this translation sheds light on Xinjiang’s political and religious traditions and makes a foundational work of Inner Asian literature available to students and scholars.
