Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850 - 2015 (2 vols.)

Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850 - 2015 (2 vols.)
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 1127
Release: 2015-10-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004304649

The last of four two-volume sets on the key periods of paradigm shift in Chinese religious and cultural history, this book examines the transformation of values in China since 1850, in the “secular” realms of economics, science, medicine, aesthetics, media, and gender, and in each of the major religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity) as well as in Marxist discourse. The nation and science are the values invoked most frequently, with the market and democracy a distant second. As in previous periods of fundamental change in Chinese history, rationalization and secularization have played central roles, but interiorization nearly disappears as a driving force. Also in continuity with the past, the state insists on an exclusive right to define and adjudicate orthodoxy. Contributors include: Daniel H. Bays, Sébastien Billioud, Adam Yuet Chau, Na Chen, Philip Clart, Walter B. Davis, Arif Dirlik, Thomas David DuBois, Lizhu Fan, David Faure, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Ji Zhe, Xiaofei Kang, Eric I. Karchmer, André Laliberté, Angela Ki Che Leung, Xun Liu, Richard Madsen, David Ownby, Ellen Oxfeld, Volker Scheid, Grace Yen Shen, Michael Szonyi, Wang Chien-ch’uan, Xue Yu

State of the Field and Disciplinary Approaches

State of the Field and Disciplinary Approaches
Author: André Laliberté
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2019-08-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110547805

The three-volume project 'Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions' presents a history of the study of Chinese religions. It evaluates the current state of scholarship, discusses a variety of analytical approaches and theories about methodology, epistemology, and the ontology of the field. The three books display an interdisciplinary approach and offer debates that transcend national traditions. It engages with a variety of methodologies for the study of East Asian religions and promotes dialogues with Western and Chinese voices. This volume covers successive historical stages in the study of religion in modern China, draws out the genealogy of major figures and intellectual achievements in a variety of research traditions, and highlights as well the challenges and evolutions experienced by the main disciplines in the last 30 years. This volume serves as a reference for graduate students and scholars interested by religions in modern Chinese societies (i.e., mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Chinese communities oversea). Using a wide range of methods, from textual analysis to fieldwork, it presents case studies via the disciplines of religious studies, anthropology, sociology, history, and political science.

Religion and Media in China

Religion and Media in China
Author: Stefania Travagnin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317534514

This volume focuses on the intersection of religion and media in China, bringing interdisciplinary approaches to bear on the role of religion in the lives of individuals and greater shifts within Chinese society in an increasingly media-saturated environment. With case studies focusing on Mainland China (including Tibet), Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as diasporic Chinese communities outside Asia, contributors consider topics including the historical and ideological roots of media representations of religion, expressions of religious faith online and in social media, state intervention (through both censorship and propaganda), religious institutions’ and communities’ use of various forms of media, and the role of the media in relations between online/offline and local/diaspora communities. Chapters engage with the major religious traditions practiced in contemporary China, namely Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and new religious movements. Religion and the Media in China serves as a critical survey of case studies and suggests theoretical and methodological tools for a thorough and systematic study of religion in modern China. Contributors to the volume include historians of religion, sinologists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and media and communication scholars. The critical theories that contributors develop around key concepts in religion—such as authority, community, church, ethics, pilgrimage, ritual, text, and practice—contribute to advancing the emerging field of religion and media studies.

Key Concepts in Practice

Key Concepts in Practice
Author: Paul R. Katz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2019-05-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110547848

In recent years, the study of modern Chinese religions has developed into a highly innovative yet challenging field. One of the main reasons for this involves an ongoing (and largely unresolved) debate regarding what methods and theories are appropriate for analyzing the wide range of beliefs and practices we encounter. This series of three volumes is based on the conviction that, in this critical period of research on modern Chinese religions, it is time for scholars to review the development of our field, reconsider its present state of theories and analytical models, and open a new chapter in the understanding of methodologies we employ. Our research is grounded on the need to re-evaluate concepts and practices that inform both the religious sphere and contemporary scholarship, including endogenous Chinese concepts and exogenous ideas from the West and Japan that have been foundational in shaping our knowledge of the Chinese religious landscape. In this third volume of our series, we examine a variety of key concepts through their praxis in modern Chinese lived religions.

China and the True Jesus

China and the True Jesus
Author: Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2018-12-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190923474

In 1917, the Beijing silk merchant Wei Enbo's vision of Jesus sparked a religious revival, characterized by healings, exorcisms, tongues-speaking, and, most provocatively, a call for a return to authentic Christianity that challenged the Western missionary establishment in China. This revival gave rise to the True Jesus Church, China's first major native denomination. The church was one of the earliest Chinese expressions of the twentieth century charismatic and Pentecostal tradition which is now the dominant mode of twenty-first century Chinese Christianity. To understand the faith of millions of Chinese Christians today, we must understand how this particular form of Chinese community took root and flourished even throughout the wrenching changes and dislocations of the past century. The church's history links together key themes in modern Chinese social history, such as longstanding cultural exchange between China and the West, imperialism and globalization, game-changing advances in transport and communications technology, and the relationship between religious movements and the state in the late Qing (circa 1850-1911), Republican (1912-1949), and Communist (1950-present-day) eras. Vivid storytelling highlights shifts and tensions within Chinese society on a human scale. How did mounting foreign incursions and domestic crises pave the way for Wei Enbo, a rural farmhand, to become a wealthy merchant in the early 1900s? Why did women in the 1920s and 30s, such as an orphaned girl named Yang Zhendao, devote themselves so wholeheartedly to a patriarchal religious system? What kinds of pressures induced church leaders in a meeting in the 1950s to agree that "Comrade Stalin" had saved many more people than Jesus? This book tells the striking but also familiar tale of the promise and peril attending the collective pursuit of the extraordinary-how individuals within the True Jesus Church in China over the past century have sought to muster divine and human resources to transform their world.

Contemporary Religions in China

Contemporary Religions in China
Author: Shawn Arthur
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2019-01-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 042981254X

Folk and popular religion is a very significant part of Chinese religious life, especially in rural areas. Contemporary Religions in China focuses on the religious activities of the lay people of contemporary China and their ideas of what it means to be "religious" and to practice "religion". Throughout, the discussion is illustrated with case studies, textboxes, images, thought questions, and further reading, which help to capture what religion is like, how and why it is practiced, and what ‘religion’ means for everyday people across China in the twenty-first century. Contemporary Religions in China is an ideal introduction to religion in China for undergraduate students of religion, Chinese studies, and anthropology.

Missionary Interests

Missionary Interests
Author: David Golding
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2024-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501774441

In Missionary Interests, David Golding and Christopher Cannon Jones bring together works about Protestant and Mormon missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, charting new directions for the historical study of these zealous evangelists for their faith. Despite their sectarian differences, both groups of missionaries shared notions of dividing the world categorically along the lines of race, status, and relative exoticism, and both employed humanitarian outreach with designs to proselytize. American missionaries occupied liminal spaces: between proselytizer and proselytized, feminine and masculine, colonizer and colonized. Taken together, the chapters in Missionary Interests dismantle easy characterizations of missions and conversion and offer an overlooked juxtaposition between Mormon and Protestant missionary efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Handbook on Religion in China

Handbook on Religion in China
Author: Stephan Feuchtwang
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2020-02-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1786437961

Informative and eye-opening, the Handbook on Religion in China provides a uniquely broad insight into the contemporary Chinese variations of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. In turn, China's own religions and transmissions of rites and systems of divination have spread beyond China, a progression that is explored in detail across 19 chapters, written by leading experts in the field.

Modern Chinese Theologies

Modern Chinese Theologies
Author: Chloë Starr
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2023-06-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506487971

This is the first volume in a series of three exploring modern Chinese theology. This volume covers "Mainland and Mainstream"--church theologians of mainland China who were predominantly associated with mainline or missionary-established denominations. In the post-1949 era of the People's Republic this translates into theologians and theological movements associated with the state-authorized church: the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and the (Protestant) Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The volume is broadly chronological, with each Part forming a thematic unity. Part I covers "Republican and Wartime Theologies," with seven chapters exploring theologies of resistance, ethics, and themes of indigenization and Sinicization. Part II considers "Protestant Denominational Developments" in the first half of the twentieth century: the complex legacy of mission history in China and the relationship between denominational church belonging and theological development. Part III, "Reform Era Theologies and Methodological Considerations" begins in the height of the Maoist era, and addresses the changing relationship between Christian and Communist thought in the writings of TSPM theologians; the theological use of China's Christian past, and the development of Roman Catholic theological education in the twenty first century. The sixteen essays of the volume represent a new generation of critical voices from the mainland, Hong Kong, and North America. The volume opens up the critical questions that have galvanized the modern Chinese church--who are we, as Chinese Christians? How can our Christian faith serve the nation? What form should an indigenous church take?--and offers new perspectives for a contemporary audience.