William A. Christian, Jr., is a religious historian and independent scholar. His books include Moving Crucifixes in Modern Spain, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, and Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (all Princeton).
A classic twentieth-century work in the anthropology of Catholicism
Person and God in a Spanish Valley is a moving portrait of how individuals and communities in a remote, mountainous valley of northern Spain relate to the divine. In the late 1960s, anthropologist and historian William A. Christian, Jr., conducted groundbreaking fieldwork in the Nansa Valley, one of the most devout regions of Spain. With sensitivity and uncommon insight, Christian describes the complex system of shrines, devotions, and pilgrimages that existed in the region for centuries, and recounts the disruption of the valley's traditional way of life as young priests from urban centers arrived carrying a more modern, Vatican II version of Catholicism. Person and God in a Spanish Valley places Catholic faith and practice within a broader history of agrarian politics and reform in northern Spain, and stands as a landmark work of modern anthropology. "William Christian has given us an extremely sensitive study of man, religion and society in a valley in Northern Spain. . . . The reader somehow experiences the passing of the generations and the centuries, the succession of priests with different views, each a representative of the Catholicism of his time, the propagation and then institutionalization of ever-changing forms of worship, and the tension set up between innovating priest and conservative community. . . . A truly admirable book. Not only will it be of value to students of the subject, it should also give them much pleasure."-Emanuel de Kadt, Religion
