This lecture will be presented by Nhung Tuyet Tran. She is from the University of Toronto.

 In early modern Vietnam, when local believers used vernacular scripts and practices to recast
Christian morality to make them legible to themselves and their fellow believers, they articulated a
new kind of communal religious identity and individual subjectivity which transcended the spiritual
realm and affected social and writing habits of non-Christians as well. Drawing from Christian
books, letters from local Christians, and transcripts from tribunals from the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Tran examines how Vietnamese articulated an identity for themselves as no
less deserving of grace and attention than any other member of the global church. This talk
focuses on how local believers articulated their religious sensibilities as a community of believers
(các bổn đạo 各本道) for themselves, to the European Church leaders who seemed not to care for
their souls, and against the non-believers (kẻ vô đạo 仉無道) around them.