The Christian Imagination by Willie James Jennings

John William Colenso set foot on the shores of Durban at Port Natal, in what is now South Africa, on Monday, January 30, 1854. This newly minted bishop of the Anglican Church was about to begin one of the most important odysseys of a missionary bishop in the history of the Christian church. The world of Bishop Colenso was far removed from that of José de Acosta. Colenso was an Anglican bishop of the nineteenth century, shaped by a Protestant church and an England still feeling the effects of the French Revolution, immersed in the industrial revolution and in the intellectual revolution that was the Enlightenment. Acosta was a Jesuit of the late fifteenth century, shaped by a Roman Catholic Church and a Spain being transformed by the discoveries of new worlds and troubled by the overturning of ecclesial life brought about under the Protestant Reformation. Yet both were missionaries at the emergence of two nation-states, successive global world powers, and both entered new worlds as those worlds were being radically transformed.

COLENSO'S FIRE: THE CRUCIBLE OF A TRANSLATOR