Berkley Center

In the concluding chapter of The Jesuits and Globalization, José Casanova synthesizes the most important lessons offered across all the chapters. Each chapter in the volume addressed two core questions from a specific thematic, historical, or regional perspective: What does the experience of globalization tell us about the Jesuits? And what does the experience of the Jesuits tell us about globalization? Casanova concludes that if one takes seriously the argument that processes of globalization are contingent historical processes, not functionally necessary processes or consequences of modernity, then the most important lesson from the global story of the Society of Jesus is that different historical processes—that is, different outcomes in the Jesuit Christian encounter in Japan, China, and India—could have led to a different age of globalization.