Search Results (70)

Through deep intertextual analysis of Tianzhu Jiangsheng Chuxiang Jingjie (Explanations on the Incarnation of God, hereafter, Jingjie), a late Ming Dynasty work by Jesuit missionary Giulio Aleni, this paper explores three levels at which the text creatively interprets Confucian and Daoist thought in the inculturation of Catholic spirituality in China, also drawing implications of Aleni’s historical inculturation for the contemporary inculturation of Christianity in China today. At the Christological level, Jingjie’s opening hymn champions the “Cosmic Christ” as a universal sage-king who creates all things with benevolence, thereby establishing an ontological foundation for its spiritual theory. At the spiritual level, Jingjie’s discourse on “proclaiming benevolence for the universal edification” characterizes the “Cosmic Christ” as a sage-king or “person of ren” (仁人), thereby acculturating the moral focus of Christian “imitatio Christi” within the Chinese tradition of spiritual cultivation. And at the level of praxis, Jingjie employs the “Dao-Vessel” distinction from the Yijing (易经, Book of Changes) and the “spiritual wandering” concept from the Zhuangzi to interpret the practice of “contemplating images” (观像) as a path of “proceeding from the traces below-form to explore the spirit above-form,” transcending the pictorial medium to attain a state of “wandering with creation.” Jingjie is therefore not only a richly illustrated narrative work but also a deeply practical spiritual guide that systematically interprets Ignatius of Loyola’s Exercitia Spiritualia through the lens of Chinese heart–mind cultivation, offering a valuable historical case study for the profound integration of Catholic theology and Chinese culture in contemporary China. Full article

The two named Ἕλλην (Hellēn) figures in Paul’s missionary practice (Timothy of Lystra at Acts 16:1–4 and Titus, a companion of Paul, at Gal 2:1–5) receive opposite treatments in the matter of circumcision. The inherited Jew/Gentile binary cannot account for this asymmetry. Recent scholarship on Timothy and Titus, in dialogue with Cohen’s work on first-century Jewish identity, treats the two cases asymmetrically: Timothy variously read as Jewish, “liminal,” or “Jew-ish,” and Titus read uniformly as Gentile, with the textual designation Hellēn in both passages absorbed into the inherited binary without explanatory weight. This article reads both pericopes through three converging disciplinary lenses: lexical semantics, rhetorical analysis, and contemporary diaspora studies. Each lens independently points toward reading Hellēn not as a synonym for ethnē but as a third term, distinct from both Gentile and Jew, designating diaspora communities of Israelite descent, occupying a contested zone of mixed praxis and Israelite ancestry. Under this reading, the different treatment of Timothy and Titus becomes legible as a coherent argumentative structure rather than two separate anomalies, with implications for how first-century Jewish categories are recovered in contemporary Pauline interpretation. Full article

Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, Europeans entered East Asia and introduced Catholicism as new maritime routes were opened and global interconnections deepened. Through practice, missionaries gradually developed a strategy of cultural accommodation, seeking converts by integrating into East Asian cultures. Although the cultural traditions of China, Japan, and Korea were broadly similar, there were differences among them, and the process of Catholic accommodation in each country reflected both shared commonalities and distinct particularities. The accommodation strategy initially led to considerable success; however, Catholic activities later posed a challenge to the traditional cultural and social orders of the three countries, and their rulers eventually adopted policies of religious prohibition to varying degrees. By the early nineteenth century, Catholicism had been banned across all three polities. Therefore, the cultural encounter between East and West on the eve of the modern era ended in intense conflict—yet Catholicism never disappeared from East Asia. Rather, it found a foothold in popular society by merging with the “little tradition.” In identifying this accommodation paradox, the article offers the wider study of religion a model of how a foreign faith interacts with an entrenched host tradition, demonstrating that the effectiveness of accommodation may itself generate the conditions of its subsequent prohibition. Full article

Late eighteenth-century Chosŏn Korea presents a distinctive case in the history of Christian missions: a Catholic community emerged without the sustained presence of foreign missionaries. This article examines that distinctiveness through the lens of text-mediated local reception. Since the seventeenth century, the writings of Matteo Ricci had rendered Christian doctrine intelligible within a Confucian framework through Jesuit accommodation. In late Chosŏn, these texts moved beyond scholarly curiosity and became a medium of criticism, moral reflection, and, for some readers, communal religious practice, particularly among politically marginalized Namin (Southern) circles and Silhak (Practical Learning)-oriented thinkers. The reception of Catholicism unfolded in stages. Sinographic texts composed by Jesuit missionaries were first understood within an existing Confucian horizon and then selectively appropriated by local readers. In some cases, this process led to baptism, early lay organization, and communal religious life. Through comparison with China, Japan, and Vietnam, this study argues that Chosŏn represents a distinctive case in which translated Christian texts, local appropriation, and community formation converged without a sustained missionary presence. It further shows that this process was shaped not by one-way transmission alone, but by the active agency of local readers and a bidirectional process of cultural translation. Full article

Emperor Qianlong’s poem San-qing Cha, translated into French in the 18th century by the Jesuit missionary Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, represents a key case study in early Sino-Western literary exchanges. Existing scholarship has mapped the poem’s transmission trajectory, yet critical gaps remain concerning the religious foundations of Amiot’s translation strategies, the socio-political context of its British reception, and the specific mechanisms driving its literary metamorphosis. Adopting the systemic descriptive translation studies framework proposed by José Lambert and Hendrik van Gorp, this article follows the poem’s journey from France to Britain and delineates three successive phases of cross-cultural reshaping: religious reframing, symbolic appropriation in British garden-design debates, and reconfiguration as a vehicle for political satire. The study argues that transcultural meaning is always constructed by the receiving context, and that Jesuit translation practices and European literary appropriations together shaped the complex, reciprocal landscape of early Sino-Western civilizational dialog. Full article

The Neo-Calvinist Johan Herman Bavinck was one of the most significant missionaries of the mid-twentieth century in the Reformed tradition. Bavinck considered the question of the status of non-Christian religion and religious consciousness the most pressing issue for missionary thought and practice. This article offers a text-driven account of Johan Herman Bavinck’s theology of religions. It argues that Bavinck treated non-Christian religion as a culpable yet always partial suppression of God’s universal self-disclosure, in which religious systems cohere around what he calls vague truths while lacking the determinate knowledge of God given in special revelation. Attention to his distinction between systems and persons clarifies how he believed missionary encounter could combine judgement with humility, as the Christian confronts unbelief while recognising the church’s own tendency toward pseudo-religion. The article situates Bavinck’s account within Reformed Augustinianism and eclecticism, such as in the use of Freudian psychology in exegesis. It then provides a preliminary application of Bavinck’s thought to select issues in Chinese Christianity as part of recent scholarly attention to the prospects of Sino-Reformed theology. Full article

In the nineteenth century, the emergence of Western Buddhist studies generated sustained debate over nirvana, one of the central doctrines of Buddhism. The British Protestant missionary Joseph Edkins actively participated in this intellectual discussion and developed a distinctive interpretation of the concept. Early in his writings, Edkins largely followed the prevailing tendency in European scholarship to interpret nirvana through a philosophical framework that equated it with nihilism. However, through extensive engagement with Chinese Buddhist texts and direct interactions with Chinese Buddhists, he gradually revised this view. Approaching the issue from the perspectives of common sense and religion, Edkins argued that nirvana, as understood in Chinese Buddhism, retained a form of practical realism rather than complete annihilation. Although he ultimately rejected the idea that nirvana could provide genuine salvation, Edkins discerned the Western Heaven (Pure Land) within his own construction of a Buddhist theory of death and interpreted it as a potential preparation for Christianity. By situating Northern Buddhism within a broader biblical narrative, he sought to reconcile tensions between nirvana and other Buddhist conceptions of the afterlife, as well as the wider doctrinal tensions between Buddhism and Christianity. As an intermediary in Sino-Western intellectual exchange, Edkins’ creative interpretation of nirvana not only reflects the imprint of Western intellectual traditions but also illuminates the complex negotiations between Christianity and Buddhism, and between faith and reason, in the nineteenth-century construction of Buddhist knowledge. Full article

Africans are widely recognised for their deeply rooted communal orientation. This ethos is intricately embedded in cultural practices such as burial rites, matrimonial customs, ritual observances, and broader conceptions of kinship. Within many African societies, the notion of family transcends the boundaries of the living, encompassing ancestors often conceptualised as the “living-dead” as well as extended familial networks. Despite the historical introduction and sustained influence of missionary and colonial religions, particularly Christianity, African Traditional Religion (ATR) continues to shape the beliefs and practices of many South Africans. Although Christianity remains a dominant religious tradition in South Africa, the persistence of ATR generates both points of convergence and sites of tension within the lived religious experiences of adherents. Against this backdrop, the present study critically examines the intersections and complexities between ATR and Christianity in South Africa, with particular emphasis on the African philosophy of community. Employing a qualitative research design informed by social cognitive theory and utilising a self-selection sampling strategy, data were collected through interviews with young adults (aged 25–40) affiliated with three mainline churches in Mamelodi, Pretoria, South Africa. The findings indicate that, while notable convergences exist between ATR and Christianity, significant complexities persist, particularly when interpreted through the lens of African communal philosophy. Full article

This paper argues that the colonial introduction of Christianity in Africa must be understood as a reordering of personhood, moral feeling, and the conditions under which lived experience becomes intelligible, rather than as a change in formal religious affiliation alone. Drawing on scholarship in African philosophy, religious history, European intellectual history, and African psychology, the paper traces how missionary Christianity reclassified African spiritual worlds, recoded suffering and misfortune, and disrupted the transmission of spiritual knowledge across generations. Crucially, it situates this encounter within the longer history of Christianity’s own disenchantment: the suppression, within dominant Protestant and Enlightenment traditions, of enchanted practices that had characterised European Christianity for over a millennium. The missionary traditions that condemned African spirit mediation, ancestral veneration, and ritual healing were carriers of a tradition that had practised structurally analogous things before disciplining them out of its own self-understanding. The paper shows that colonial religion produced layered forms of subjectivity in which ancestral obligation, Christian doctrine, communal personhood, moral anxiety, and therapeutic pluralism coexist in tension. The concept of ontological compression is proposed to name the condition under which parts of the self become unsayable within authorised vocabularies, a condition rendered doubly intense by the fact that the compressing tradition had already performed this narrowing upon itself. Rather than treating African spirituality as residue, superstition, or cultural background, the paper proposes that it should be approached as a living philosophical and psychological archive through which many people continue to interpret suffering, relation, responsibility, and reality itself. Full article

Since the late Qing, Christianity helped reconfigure China’s modern intellectual landscape not simply by importing “Western knowledge” but by constructing the epistemic frameworks through which knowledge was named, classified, and circulated. This article examines how the Christian idea of “homemaking” was scientized through translation and became jiazheng (家政, Home Economics) in Republican China, emerging as a new discipline within women’s education. It centers on Laura Marsden White (1867–1937), an American Protestant missionary and pioneer of women’s education who founded China’s first Christian women’s monthly, Nüduo (The Woman’s Messenger, 1912–1951) and initiated its jiazheng column as an institutional infrastructure for domestic science knowledge. Foregrounding White as a missionary–translator and translingual mediator, this study argues that her work participated in the construction of modern home economics rather than merely transmitting a ready-made field. Strategically aligning her translation with Confucian gendered ethics, White rendered home economics intelligible as jiazheng while simultaneously reorganizing household practices into a systematic, science-based curriculum. By circulating scientific knowledge, standardized curricular categories, and credentialed forms of expertise, White recast women’s domestic responsibilities as socially recognized knowledge and employable labor. Her translation offered Chinese women a historically specific route into schooling, writing, and public service, allowing them to negotiate the traditional gender divide without abandoning the culturally legible language of the family. Translation thus serves as both a medium of Protestant moral pedagogy and an engine of disciplinary formation and gendered social change. Full article

The intellectual exchanges between late-Ming Jesuits and Chinese literati have long been interpreted primarily as a process of cultural accommodation aimed at “harmonizing with Confucianism” (合儒), and scholarship has tended to focus on missionary strategies, social networks, or individual conversion histories. By contrast, the question of how resources within Confucian thought made ethical dialogue with Catholicism possible—especially why the practical-learning strand (實學派) of Wang Yangming’s School (陽明學) exhibited such pronounced receptivity to Catholic ideas among late-Ming literati—remains insufficiently theorized at the level of conceptual structure. This study, therefore, shifts the analytical focus from “historical narratives of converts” to an explanation of the mechanisms that enabled Sino-Jesuit dialogue. It argues that Augustine and Wang Yangming display a notable convergence in their conceptions of good and evil (善惡論), and that this convergence created an intellectual space for engagement between Jesuits and later Yangming scholars. The Jesuits’ deliberate promotion of doctrines concerning the punishment of evil (懲惡) further facilitated the practical-learning Yangmingists’ reception of Catholic resources regarding ultimate judgment and retributive justice, especially as they confronted the problem of inadequate means to restrain or punish wrongdoing. This article situates late-Ming Sino-Western intellectual exchange within an analytical framework of “theories of good and evil—mechanisms for punishing evil—pathways for supplementing Confucianism (補儒),” thereby offering a mechanism-based explanation, grounded in theories of good and evil, for the historical interaction between Chinese Confucian thought and the ethical systems of incoming religions. Full article

This article considers traditional Inuit beliefs and practices as expressed through human–animal relationality, examining the physical and spiritual significance of qimmiit (sled dogs), and how qimmiit functioned as co-travellers with humans across physical and spiritual realms of existence. Drawing on ethnographic and missionary narrative sources, it explores Inuit–Qimmiit relationality as central to survival in the pre-modern period. Consulted sources include the writings of explorer–ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, Church of England missionary Edmund James Peck, anthropologist Franz Boas, explorer–author Peter Freuchen, and Oblate missionary Pierre Henry (Kajualuk). These accounts, despite Euro-centric and Christian biases, provide distinct yet overlapping experiences with sled dogs and understandings of Inuit traditions and worldviews. Read comparatively, these ethnographic texts reveal how qimmiit were essential to mobility and spiritual–social order. The article draws on the Qikiqtani Truth Commission to contextualize the harm and suffering caused by the loss of qimmiit during the dog killings of the 1950s to 1970s. The song “Travel Without Me,” from the Animal Kinship Project and written to commemorate qimmiit in the aftermath of the sled dog slaughter, provides a narrative framework structured around kinship and travel, foregrounding Inuit understandings of shared journeys across human and canine existence and framing Inuit–Qimmiit relations as enduring bonds that traverse both physical life and afterlife. Within Inuit religious cosmologies, relationships between humans and qimmiit extend beyond practical cooperation to encompass shared spiritual existence, relational obligation, and continuity of soul across physical and metaphysical worlds. Ethnographic accounts recorded by Rasmussen, Peck, Boas, Freuchen and Henry describe dogs not merely as working animals but as ensouled beings who participate in travel, naming practices, shamanic mediation, cosmogonic and afterlife narratives. Read through a religious studies lens, these sources reveal a cosmological framework in which mobility and survival are embedded within sacred relational structures linking human and animal life. This article examines Inuit–Qimmiit kinship as a form of physical–spiritual relationality, arguing that dogs function as co-travellers whose relational position across embodied and cosmological domains illuminates Inuit understandings of personhood, cosmological balance, and the continuity of life beyond death. Full article

Introduction: Religious practices can shape lifestyles, influence health choices, and help individuals cope with illness and suffering. Understanding which aspects of religiosity support health-promoting attitudes is particularly important. This study explores how belonging to a religious community affects health and well-being among religious sisters. Materials and Methods: An anonymous survey was conducted among 463 women from international, apostolic Catholic congregations in Poland and 33 other countries. The questionnaire included questions on lifestyle, physical health (including diet, physical activity, sleep, chronic conditions, and medication use), and perceptions of how community life influences health and encourages health-conscious behaviors. Results: Overall, 57% of participants reported following a healthy lifestyle, most commonly sisters aged 65 and older (73%). Non-Polish sisters and those living outside Poland were more likely to report healthy habits. Among sisters who saw their community as beneficial for health, 69% led a healthy lifestyle. Retreats, a sense of belonging, communal prayers, and vacations were consistently rated as having the most positive impact on well-being, particularly among older sisters and missionaries. Conclusions: Life in a religious community appears to support health both directly, through structured daily routines and shared responsibilities, and indirectly, by providing social support and fostering a sense of purpose. Spiritual practices, rest, and close interpersonal relationships emerge as the most influential factors for well-being, while formal obligations such as wearing religious attire or attending formation meetings were rated as less impactful. These findings highlight the important role of communal life in promoting both physical and spiritual health among religious sisters. Full article

Since the 19th century, Protestant missionaries in Guangdong have extensively engaged in the translation and publication of religious texts, employing localized strategies in the illustration of Christian novels. Within the local cultural context of late Qing Guangdong, missionaries collaborated with local scholars, used Cantonese for writing, and designed novel illustrations to overcome barriers in doctrinal dissemination, thereby facilitating the spread of Christianity. The illustrations in missionary-published novels, such as The Pilgrim’s Progress in Vernacular and The Spiritual Warfare in Vernacular, adopted the stylistic features of Ming and Qing novel woodcuts in terms of lines, composition, character attire, and settings. Furthermore, they skillfully incorporated the Confucian moral framework of loyalty, filial piety, chastity, and righteousness, as represented in the Sacred Edict, into their narrative ethics, while integrating elements such as Buddhist causality and Daoist imagery into a “didactic” system. This localization strategy, combined with a “trinity” reading guidance model comprising images, text, and biblical annotations, visually elucidated the tenets of the Bible and encouraged the public to embrace Christianity. The localized practice of missionary novel illustrations served as a conscious and effective visual strategy aimed at bridging cultural divides and promoting the dissemination of the Gospel. It profoundly reflects the visual agency in modern Sino–Western cultural exchanges and significantly advanced the propagation of Christianity. Full article

This article addresses the recent conflict in the Netherlands between a national ethnographic museum, the Wereldmuseum Berg en Dal (formerly Afrika Museum), and a Catholic congregation, the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, both of which legally own half of the museum’s collection. The case highlights the challenging situations faced by ethnographic museums with missionary legacies in the Netherlands over the past few decades. This article critically examines not only the handling of the conflict between the Wereldmuseum and the Spiritan fathers based on current legal frameworks and museum policies, but also the motives behind their initial collaboration. Finally, it proposes alternative practices for a more ethical approach to African heritage, contributing to debates about museum reconfiguration and ethical restitution. Full article