Timothy J. Johnson – författare

the thirteenth-century Franciscan Roger Bacon wrote, “Place is the principle of the generation of things” (Opus majus, 301). Simply put, places have agency; they make things happen. The city of St. Augustine is just such a place, and the Franciscan friars who arrived there as early as the sixteenth century shaped the city's history and surrounding region for over two centuries. Prior to the 450th anniversary of St. Augustine in 2015, Flager College hosted an International Conference in March of 2011, entitled “From La Florida to La California: The Genesis and Realization of Franciscan Evangelization in the Spanish Borderlands.”This gathering brought together anthropologists, archeologists, historians, linguists, and theologians from both sides of the Atlantic to examine the political, cultural, and spiritual impact of the Franciscans on the human geographies of Florida, Georgia, Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. The conference essays, gathered in this volume, are the first systematic study of Franciscan missionary efforts throughout the Spanish Borderlands. they reveal that the momentous encounter between the Old and New World, still evident today in St. Augustine, cannot be divorced from the story of the poor man from Assisi and those who followed him.

Founded in 1565, St. Augustine was the multicultural, and often embattled, outpost of the Spanish empire. St. Augustine's economic, political, and religious power was reflected in other towns and villages that stretched across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. Scholars frequently refer to this broad swath of territories as the ""Spanish Borderlands."" Of those who accompanied the Spanish to these lands, it was members of the Franciscan Order who, as missionaries, had the most direct contact and interaction with the diverse populations of American Indians.As the 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine drew near, scholars from the Americas and Europe gathered on Mar 13-15, 2014, for the conference, ""Franciscan Florida in Pan-Borderlands Perspective: Adaptation, Negotiation, and Resistance"" at Flagler College in St. Augustine. The expressed intent of the gathering was, as David Hurst Thomas writes in the Introduction, to ""address issues of acculturation, political and economic relations, religious conversions, and the nature of multiethnic relationships across the Spanish Borderlands.""The result is a rich collection of essays from anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, historians, and theologians. Diverse contributions of the Navajo, Hopi, and California tribal members in attendance was a reminder of the complexity of the thematic and an on-going challenge to continue research into new, and yet unexplored territories.