The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History


Book Description

The Chinese Catholic Church traces its living roots back to the late sixteenth century and its historical roots back even further, to the Yuan dynasty. This book explores paintings and sculptures of the Virgin Mary and the communities that produced them over several centuries. It argues for the emergence of distinctly Chinese Catholic identities as artistic representations of the Virgin Mary, at different times and in different places, absorbed and in turn influenced representations of Chinese figures from Guanyin to the Empress Dowager. At other times indigenous styles have been diluted by Western influences—following the influx of European missionaries in the nineteenth century, for example, or with globalization in recent years. The book engages with history, theology and art, and draws on imagery and archival photographs that have been largely neglected. As a study of the social and cultural histories of communities that have survived over many centuries, this book offers a new view of Catholicism in China—one that sees its history as more than simply a cycle of persecution and resistance. Fr. Jeremy Clarke, SJ, is an Australian Province Jesuit teaching as an assistant professor in the History Department of Boston College. He is also a school visitor in the Australian Center for China in the World at the Australian National University, Canberra.




Translating Religion


Book Description

Translating Religion advances thinking about translation as a critical category in religious studies, combining theoretical reflection about processes of translation in religion with focused case studies that are international, interdisciplinary, and interreligious. By operating with broad conceptions of both religion and translation, this volume makes clear that processes of translation, broadly construed, are everywhere in both religious life and the study of religion; at the same time, the theory and practice of translation and the advancement of translation studies as a field has developed in the context of concerns about the possibility and propriety of translating religious texts. The nature of religions as living historical traditions depends on the translation of religion from the past into the present. Interreligious dialogue and the comparative study of religion require the translation of religion from one tradition to another. Understanding the historical diffusion of the world’s religions requires coming to terms with the success and failure of translating a religion from one cultural context into another. Contributors ask what it means to translate religion, both textually and conceptually, and how the translation of religious content might differ from the translation of other aspects of human culture. This volume proposes that questions on the nature of translation find particularly acute expression in the domains of religion, and argues that theoretical approaches from translation studies can be fruitfully brought to bear on contemporary religious studies.




Representations of the Blessed Virgin Mary in World Literature and Art


Book Description

This interdisciplinary study explores Marian imagery and representations in world literature and art throughout the centuries. This book demonstrates the widespread deep veneration of the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary in various countries and different Christian traditions. Devotion to the Holy Virgin has served as a bridge to different cultures, overcoming all types of possible borders. Religious and cultural literacy is crucial for domestic and international politics, the practice of peace, harmony, justice and prosperity. This book also gives recognition and pays homage to the influence of the image of Mater Dolorosa in shaping art and literature around the world.




Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History


Book Description

This book is a timely and solid portrait of modern China from the First Opium War to the Xi Jinping era. Unlike the handful of existing textbooks that only provide narratives, this textbook fashions a new and practical way to study modern China. Written exclusively for university students, A-level or high school teachers and students, it uses primary sources to tell the story of China and introduces them to existing scholarship and academic debate so they can conduct independent research for their essays and dissertations. This book will be required reading for students who embark on the study of Chinese history, politics, economics, diaspora, sociology, literature, cultural, urban and women’s studies. It would be essential reading to journalists, NGO workers, diplomats, government officials, businessmen and travellers.




The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ:


Book Description

This volume provides an annotated bibliography of the Western and Chinese literature on Jesus Christ in China. It is a sequel to the interdisciplinary collection on the manifold faces and images of Jesus throughout Chinese history, from the Tang dynasty (618?907) to the present time.The present bibliography broadens and deepens the above-mentioned subject matter, and also points out aspects which have been addressed in the contributions and anthologies of the previous volumes of The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ, but which have not been treated thoroughly. Another aim of this bibliography is to initiate and enable further research, particularly in China. It includes bibliographical data from the beginning of the introduction of Christianity to China until the year 2013, occasionally also until 2014. A list of ?Key References? enables the reader to identify important works on main topics related to Jesus Christ in China. Some examples of book covers and title pages are included in the section of ?Illustrations.?Other volumes of the collection The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ are in preparation: Vol. 3c will present longer quotations from the sources listed in the present bibliography, Vol. 4b will contain a general index with glossary, and Vol. 5 will deal with the iconography of Jesus Christ in China.




Missionary Spaces


Book Description

The ‘spatial turn’ of missionary places Situated at the crossroads of missionary history, imperial history and colonial architecture, this volume examines the architectural staging and spatial implications of the worldwide expansion of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on specific architectural fragments, analysing the intersection of Christian edifices in colonial and traditional urban settings or unravelling the social understanding of missionary places, each chapter strives to understand the agency of missionary spaces. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and fields, this book aims to centre those missionary spaces by approaching them not merely as décor around and within which the missionary encounter was acted, but by making them part and parcel of it. Through its approach, Missionary Spaces provides a new paradigm for scrutinising the ‘spatial turn’ for missionary histories and contributes to the increased attention across the humanities to space, place, and location since the late 1990s. Space does not occur as an historical given, but as a social construction to be analysed, while at the same time having explanatory value of its own. This book focuses on Africa and the Chinese Region with contributions on Burundi, China, Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, and Taiwan.




China’s Catholics in an Era of Transformation


Book Description

This book features a collection of essays on China’s modern Catholic Church by a scholar of China-West intellectual and religious exchange. The essays and reflections were mostly written in China while the author was traveling by train, or staying in villages or large cities near to Roman Catholic cathedrals or other important historical sites during research trips to the country. It is clear that Clark’s understanding of Catholicism in China evolved from the first entry to the final ones in 2019. The essays included in this compendium were written in disparate contexts and in response to different events. As such, there is no obvious theme or order to the content. However, despite this, the book provides valuable insights for readers wishing to gain a better understanding of the complex topography of Catholic history in China, the contours of which have undergone stark transformations with each dynastic, political, and ecclesial transition. The information presented serves to highlight and explain the lives of Catholic people and the events that have punctuated one of the most significant dimensions of China’s long history of friendship, conflict and exchange with the West.




The Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood and the Evolution of the Catholic Church


Book Description

This book traces the origins of the Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood in Hong Kong and their history up to the early 1970s, and contributes to the neglected area of Chinese Catholic women in the history of the Chinese Catholic Church. It studies the growth of an indigenous community of Chinese sisters, who acquired a formal status in the local and universal Catholic Church, and the challenge of identifying Chinese Catholic women in studies dealing with the Chinese Church in the first half of the twentieth century, as these women remained "faceless" and "nameless" in contrast to their Catholic male counterparts of the period. Emphasizing the intertwining histories of the Hong Kong Church, the churches in China, and the Roman Catholic Church, it demonstrates how the history of the Precious Blood Congregation throws light on the formation and development of indigenous groups of sisters in contemporary China.




Learning from All the Faithful


Book Description

Do various members of the church--regardless of their generation, gender, race, sexual orientation, country of origin, and whatever their doubts are about official church teachings and policies--have any role in determining, safeguarding, and assessing the authentic teaching and praxis of the faith of the church? This has always been a haunting question in the life of the Christian church, though only recently acknowledged, because of the long-standing role of male clergy of European descent with a Eurocentric outlook who held hierarchical offices and determined official doctrines and moral and disciplinary codes. There have been controversies that bear on these matters over the course of the church's history. But it has only been over the last fifty years that the question has received increasing attention among Roman Catholics in terms of the baptismal anointing of the Spirit that bestows the gift of the sense of the faith on individuals and the collective sense of the faithful. This gift provides discerning skills to recognize, receive, and imaginatively and practically apply the living faith in history and society. This book explores these issues from historical, sociological, systematic and theological ethical perspectives, infused by the contributions of world Christianities.




Lightning from the East


Book Description

The Church of Almighty God, also known as Eastern Lightning, teaches that Jesus Christ has returned to earth as a Chinese woman to judge humankind. The Chinese government has banned it and similar groups, and targeted them in its campaign against “cults” such as Falun Gong. Based on the Church’s own texts and exogenous reports, Emily Dunn offers the first comprehensive account of what the Church of Almighty God teaches, how Chinese Christians and the government have responded to new religious movements related to Protestantism, and how it all fits with global Christianity and the history of Chinese religion.