scholarly journals Where the Research Interests of Graduate Students in China’s Christian Universities Lie

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 393
Author(s):  
Fulin Li ◽  
Qing Wu
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
Categorical Data Analysis ◽  
Christian Universities ◽  
Christianity In China ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Chinese Christianity ◽  
Practical Research

Focusing on the research landscape for graduate students of China’s Christian universities is of great significance for making sense of the path along which the theological and practical studies are conducted by contemporary China’s Christian universities and for promoting the dialogue and understanding between Chinese and foreign seminaries. In this research, thesis topics selected by graduate students majoring in theology are classified into four categories: universal theoretical research, universal practical research, theoretical research of Chinese Christianity, and practical research of Chinese Christianity. Results of coded categorical data analysis and case study show that graduate students mainly focus on universal theories without giving adequate attention to the topic of the “Sinification” of Christianity. In their universal theoretical research, graduate students examine classic Christian works and theological thoughts of important figures in a detailed and in-depth way. Universal practical studies are skewed to practices of religious reforms and teaching improvements from a multidisciplinary perspective. In the theoretical research of Sinified Christianity, researchers build upon the commensurability between traditional Chinese culture and Christian theology, including the theological thoughts of important Christian figures in China, to explore the fulfillment of cultural, national, and social identities. In the practical research of Christianity in China, empirical methodologies are widely applied, centering on the “localization” process and forms of practices taking place in churches of China. The coincidentia oppositorum between universality and particularity dictates that much tension exists with respect to the development of Christianity in China. Focusing on the accommodative process between universality and particularity is important to produce further implications for research to be conducted by China’s Christian universities.

Making Sense of Religion and Food

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Biological Information ◽  
Approaches To Teaching ◽  
Cultural System ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Mary Douglas ◽  
Pedagogical Approaches

When looking at eating beyond physical nourishment, British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921-2007) defined food as a cultural system, or code that communicates not only biological information, but social structure and meaning. What can a study of food and faith teach us, as scholars of religion, that we might not otherwise know? This article outlines thematic and pedagogical approaches to teaching food and religion through the lens of five semesters of teaching this course to undergraduate and graduate students. In it, I explore the topics of Food memory and community; Food and scripture; Food, gender and race; and Stewardship and Charity, thinking about spiritual and physical nourishment in the world's major religious traditions.

Masao Abe and Comparative Theology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo D. Lefebure
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Comparative Theology ◽  
Graduate Course ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Faith Tradition ◽  
Mahayana Buddhist

A leading form of comparative theology entails commitment to one religious tradition but ventures out to encounter another tradition, with the goal of generating fresh insights into familiar beliefs and practices reliant upon both the tradition of origin and the newly encountered faith tradition. This chapter, based on a graduate course at Georgetown University, examines how Zen Buddhist thinker Masao Abe engages in a dialogue with Western philosophy and Christian theology. Abe interpreted the meaning of the kenosis (emptying) of God in Jesus Christ in Christian theology in light of Mahayana Buddhist perspectives on Sunyata (emptying) and the logic of negation. The chapter includes responses to Abe from various Christian theologians, including Georgetown graduate students.

scholarly journals Sensemaking and identity management amidst major organizational change

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Madeline Pringle
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Change ◽  
Graduate Students ◽  
Online Education ◽  
Student Teaching ◽  
Identity Management ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Organizational Leaders ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Management Processes

Organizational change is inevitable and its impacts will affect all members, albeit to different degrees. These changes also bring about uncertainty, especially as it pertains to one's organization-based identities. However, when studying change and identity, organizational communication scholars have often missed studying the interplay of one's many organization-based identities and how these are made sense of and managed amidst major organizational change. This thesis employs a phronetic-iterative methodology to analyze 16 semi-structured interviews with U.S. graduate students to understand how they have made sense of and managed their organization-based (i.e., graduate student, teaching assistant/instructor, department, university) identities after the COVID-19-induced transition to fully online education in Spring 2020. Analysis of this data suggested that participants used two types of ideal self discursive resources to make sense of and manage these identities, while also experiencing their sensemaking and identity management processes in two distinct stages. Additionally, participants revealed the importance of organizational places as it pertained to making sense of this change and its impacts. With these findings, this thesis extends theoretical work surrounding sensemaking, identity, and place, especially as it pertains to organizational change and providespractical recommendations for organizational leaders in academia to assist some of their highly impacted and identity-precarious populations--graduate students.

scholarly journals Re-criticism of Geomantic Omen in Modern Design from the Perspective of Data Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 03004
Author(s):  
Qi Liu ◽  
Huagang Yang ◽  
Yiwei Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
Research Trend ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Modern Design ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Development Practice

Geomantic omen is both strange and familiar to the contemporary people. It is not only a part of the traditional Chinese culture, but also contains the contradictions and disputes in Chinese long history of thought, practice and theory. This article is based on the context of modern design, discuss the reason of the Geomantic omen cannot be the key factors of modern design from three perspectives, including research trend, discipline development, practice creation. Through the summary of data, typical cases, and geomantic theory, it is believed that modern geomantic research should be based on rational evaluation and theoretical research. Except that, geomancy can be study not only by using modern science and technology, but also through transcending the ideological level. Finally, the idea of the future development of geomantic is set up for the re-thinking and re-exploration of the contemporary research.

Christianity in China

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. Hayford
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Spiritual Experience ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Christianity In China ◽  
The Bible

In the early 21st century, Christianity in China is a diverse, growing, and small but resilient force. Estimates vary, but one informed report speculates that the number of Christians is perhaps 5 percent of the population, in any case giving China one of the largest Christian populations in the world. Historically, like Buddhism in earlier times and Marxism in the 20th century, both of which also came from outside China, Christianity has become Chinese in many forms: as doctrine and theology, as institutions, as communities, and as spiritual experience. In the 16th century, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci argued for a Sino-Christian synthesis based on the natural theology that God had placed in Confucian classics as well as the Bible. After the emperor proscribed Christianity and expelled foreign missions in 1724, Catholic village communities grew by melding Christianity into local Chinese religions. In the century after the Opium Wars of the 1840s, Protestant and Catholic missionaries and Chinese Christians established a network of churches, seminaries, schools, universities, hospitals, and publishing houses, which all made key contributions to the emerging Chinese nation. At the same time, independent Chinese evangelicals attracted large followings based on their own readings of the Bible. After 1949 the new People’s Republic of China once again expelled foreign missions and campaigned to suppress or control all religions except officially sanctioned groups. Yet the number of Christians still rose, mainly in the countryside. When the post-1978 reforms brought a loss of faith in Marxism and a spiritual crisis, Catholic and mainline Protestant churches thrived, as did “underground churches,” but the fastest growing groups were independent evangelicals and Pentecostals, again especially in the countryside. In short, over the centuries there have been many and often competing Chinese Christianities. For many millions, Christianity was a spiritual experience and daily practice which gave meaning to life. Doubters saw Christianity as a foreign religion incompatible with Chinese culture, while China’s rulers, both before and after the 1949 revolution, assumed that it was their responsibility to regulate all religions, especially ones they saw as foreign. Nationalists charged that Christianity entered China by what they called imperialist “gunboat diplomacy,” accused converts of being “rice Christians,” and charged that “one more Christian is one less Chinese.” In recent decades, perhaps no other field in Chinese studies has changed more than the study of Christianity. The earliest scholars, often missionaries or their sympathizers, wrote reverentially of struggles to create a Chinese church and plant the seeds of Christianity. Recent scholarship centers on Chinese Christianities as independent and authentic entities, not as versions of western Christianity; on missions as part of Chinese society; on grassroots communities that practice Christianity as a Chinese folk or popular religion; on Christianities which enlarge rather than replace Chinese identities; and on lived experience as much as on orthodoxy and doctrine.

Social Governance Concepts in Traditional Chinese Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-160
Author(s):  
Fanjia Meng ◽  
Ming Wang
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Filial Piety ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Traditional Culture ◽  
Tsinghua University ◽  
Social Governance ◽  
Systematic Fashion ◽  
Traditional Chinese Culture ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract Within China’s outstanding traditional culture lies a wealth of thought on social governance. In an effort to organize these ideas in systematic fashion, this text contains the dialogue that took place in the autumn of 2019 during a course for public administration graduate students entitled “Innovation in Social Governance.” The dialogue was between Professor Wang Ming of Tsinghua University and sinologist Meng Fanjia, who is a 74th-generation descendant of the great philosopher Mencius and an advocate of contemporary shi culture (a shi is one who aspires to become a person of noble character as defined by traditional Chinese culture). The dialogue, full of novel concepts, summarizes the definition of the word “traditional”. Their discussion was both broadly inclusive and profoundly insightful in the aspects of rite, being a man of noble character, virtue, being a scholar, goodness, filial piety, law, kinship, and morality.

scholarly journals Beyond Simplifications: Making Sense of Paradoxical Chinese Values in Chinese-Western Business Negotiations

2020 ◽  
pp. 232948842090713
Author(s):  
Marleen Spijkman ◽  
Menno D. T. de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Simultaneous Occurrence ◽  
Chinese Values ◽  
Business Partners ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Chinese Business ◽  
Yin And Yang ◽  
Business Negotiations

Previous research has drawn attention to the coexistence of paradoxical Chinese values in modern China, which might influence Chinese-Western business negotiations. In this study, we empirically investigate this phenomenon from the perspective of Western business negotiators. In two interview rounds, 17 seasoned Dutch negotiators were asked about their experiences when negotiating with Chinese business partners. The results confirm the coexistence of paradoxical Chinese values in business negotiations and identify four patterns in which traditional and modern values may occur: random, contextual, transitional, and simultaneous occurrence. On the basis of our findings, we argue that there is a need for Western negotiators to develop a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and paradoxical values from the Chinese worldview of Yin and Yang.

Christian Biblical Tradition in the Jing Chinese Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 494-510
Author(s):  
Yanrong Chen
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Christianity In China ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Literature

Most studies of the Bible in China focus on Protestant churches starting in the nineteenth century, as a Chinese Catholic Bible was absent during the first two-hundred-year history of Christianity in China until an official edition was published in the twentieth century. In fact, despite the absence of a full translation, the Bible was rendered into a wide variety of genres corresponding to the native Chinese culture of sacred texts called jing in Chinese. This essay provides a broadened view of the Bible reception in China by presenting a range of Chinese Christian sacred texts from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. These texts conveyed biblical words and messages to Chinese audiences of the time, and they creatively integrated genres from the European Church’s convention of Christian literature and the Chinese literary courses of classical studies and religious texts. This overview demonstrates major examples and organizes them according to their compositions. The diverse types form a spectrum of Chinese Christian sacred texts, in which most individual Chinese Christian works studied in this volume can find a proper place to fit.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document