Renie Chow Choy and "Ancestral Feeling: Postcolonial Thoughts on Western Christian Heritage"
Last night I finished this remarkable book by Dr Renie Chow Choy on how non-Western Christians can and should have a legitimate claim on the Western Christian heritage. It is rich in historical argument, interwoven with personal testimony (her connection to the Toronto Chinese Baptist community is fascinating along with so much else of her background), and timely in so many ways. I first came across it on the recommendation of my dear friend Baiyu Andrew Song. I then decided to use it as a textbook in an upper-level course on historiography that I am teaching at Redeemer University. I am lecturing on it this week and hope to write a full-length review.
Dr Choy was born in Hong Kong and has lived in Toronto, where she was baptized. After studies in the United States, she received her doctorate from the University of Oxford. She is currently serving as the Associate Lecturer in Church History at Westcott House in Cambridge.
Her expertise is in medieval monasticism. Her main academic work in this regard is Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford University Press), which led one reviewer of it to describe her as “among the finest and most sensitive students of early medieval monasticism.”[1]
[1] Martin Claussen, Review of Renie S. [sic] Choy, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms, Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs, The Medieval Review (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/24068/29745; accessed February 12, 2023).