The language of heritage permeates Scripture, encouraging Christians to approach church history like a family history. But the notion of ancestry also constrains the world's Catholics and Protestants to trace their confessional descent from Europe, rendering them perpetual latecomers in the historical chain. Ancestral Feeling systematically diagnoses the postcolonial problems generated by an ancestral outlook. But, applying critical theories in cultural studies to the study of church history, the book experiments with ways that the Western Christian inheritance can awaken the memory of one's own ancestors. Writing a personal reflection on her family's history in British-ruled Hong Kong, Renie Chow Choy engages autobiographically with England's ecclesiastical art, architecture, music, and literature, in order to affirm her attachment to a heritage normally associated with English national identity. For global and immigrant Christians brought into a relationship with English Christianity by colonialism but are bypassed by its history, this book makes a bold declaration: England's Christian heritage is also our story. "A superb book: hopeful, eloquent and timely. Skilfully weaving personal narrative with variegated threads of scholarship, Renie Choy crafts a heartfelt case for an inclusive approach to English Christian heritage and our ancestral past, to find in both a home with many mansions." -- The Rt Revd Dr Andrew Rumsey, Bishop of Ramsbury and Joint Lead on Church Buildings and Cathedrals, Author of English Grounds "Remarkable and rewarding. A brave and complex book that ought to be essential reading not only for anyone interested in postcolonialism but for everyone who cares about the history and future of Christianity." -- Dame Averil Cameron, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History, University of Oxford "This pioneering book discusses the structure of ancestral feelings through the postcolonial lenses of nostalgia and amnesia, roots and routes, ambivalence and dissonance, identity and identification, and affinity and affiliation. I highly recommend it to faculty, students, and the general public who want to interpret English Christian heritage from postcolonial and global perspectives." -- Kwok Pui-lan, Dean's Professor of Systematic Theology, Candler School of Theology, Emory University Renie Chow Choy is Lecturer in Church History at St Mellitus College and obtained her doctorate from University of Oxford. She has published on various aspects of early medieval Christianity, and is the author of Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford University Press). She is currently working on inclusive memory in the interpretation of England's historic churches.