This session pushes the boundaries of Chinese Christianities by comparing various ideologies in Chinese Christian practice, especially in material forms. We have four papers; they include readings of a comic strip in the post-Maoist state-sanctioned church, the geographies of Christian Zionism, the social imaginations of Indonesian Chinese Christians in the face of trauma, and Catholic Bible translations in late imperial China. The purpose of this session is to generate conversation on how the field of Chinese Christianities integrates reflection and critique on both ideologies and materialities and grounds scholarly conversation in the concreteness of lived Chinese Christian experiences in its diverse forms.
This presentation explores the discourses on womanhood in PRC’s state-sanctioned Church (TSPM) through examining the comic series “Sister Martha.” Its protagonist Martha, a Maoist “iron girl” who lives a Christian life while upholding communist ideologies, is explored as a nexus of responses to various social, religious and political questions in the post-Maoist China. This presentation complicates the Western liberal critique that TSPM church is “less Christian” as a site of CCP’s manipulation of religious freedom. By engaging with post-colonial, feminist and Islamic theorists, I explore the comic to show how the TSPM church community can also be generative of feminist theology and Christian women’s practice in contemporary China.
This paper compares the implications of two spiritual exercises in the context of Indonesian-Chinese Christianity 25 years after the May 1998 riot that traumatized many Chinese-Christian people. I compare and analyze Inward Training, a Taoist mysticism text, and several writings by Howard Thurman on meditation and centering down. Inward Training pictures the presence of “The Way” and a vital flow of energy (ching) within the cosmos, including the self, that requires cultivation for harmonious living. Quite parallelly, Thurman argues the human Spirit contains latent “inner vitality” that must be realized and unleashed, and the discipline of moving in necessitates venturing to great lengths outside oneself. Because these two moral texts emerge from different contexts, they carry a distinct extrovertive expression. I will compare how these two spiritual exercises could be appropriated to Indonesian-Chinese Christianity in the aftermath of socio-religious trauma to precipitate healing.
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| Stephanie Wong | stephanie.wong@villanova… | View |