So thank you very much, Amy, for the introduction.

And thanks to all of you who came here this evening, making time and busy schedules to hear

talk about Jesuit priests who have been dead for a long time.

I'm very pleased to be back here at Harvard, where I spent some very formative years of my life.

And it's a special treat to be a guest of the Harvard graduate chapter of the Plysmistic Institute

in particular.

And it's heartwarming actually for me to speak here about my book, Apostle of the Empire,

the Jesuits and New France, because the book, in some ways, can be said to have started

life some years ago as a seminar paper that I wrote here at Harvard when I was a master's student at the Divinity School.

And I also talked at that time, the line of Boston, Cambridge, Catholic grad student and young professional community.

So it's a treat to be with the Institute.

Now, as you can see up on this shameless first PowerPoint slide,

I'm finding my book to you.

The book was published past July by the University of Nebraska Press.

And it's about the Jesuit mission to French colonial America in the 1600s and 1700s.

This was a Catholic mission among diverse Native American peoples of eastern Canada,

the Great Lakes region, and parts of what became in the states of New York and Maine,

and eventually also the Mississippi Valley.

Now in my talk tonight, I will give you a general overview of the book, brief first part,

but then I thought I would focus in on two themes that I thought might interest this audience in particular.

And these are first some ways that the book project change the way I look at some of the

missions canonized saints and how they fit into a bigger picture.

...