Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule . By Fenggang Yang . New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+245. $24.95 (paper) (original) (raw)
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Journal of Lutheran Ethics, 2003
This paper was presented at an International Symposium on "Religions, Morality and Social Concerns" at Fudan University, Shanghai, China in April 2003. The university's newly established Institute of Religious Studies brought together Christians (Protestant and Catholic), Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Marxists and others from China, other Asian countries, Europe and the United States. According to the university's president, this was the first symposium at the university dealing with religion since Mao's revolution in 1949. The papers varied in their approaches and content, and discussion was open and respectful. I chose to present a Christian understanding of the relationship of faith and the moral life from the "inside." I make the connection between faith and moral life by use of the notion "narrative." I sketch elements of the Christian narrative, and I draw out their meaning for the moral life.
Researching the religious dimensions of social life pre review version
As the earlier sections of this book demonstrate, research in the sociology of religion has much to contribute to our understanding of important structures and processes in religious institutions and individual religiosity as well forms of interaction between religious organisations and other fields of social life. The aim of this chapter is to delineate an area of research within the contemporary sociology of religion that has arguably been less well-developed than this work on the religious lives of individuals and organisations, but which constitutes an important area for future work. A central assumption of much work in the sociology of religion over the past forty years is that it most naturally focuses on beliefs, practices, organisations and social structures and processes that relate to human engagement with supra-human beings or forces. This piece examines an alternative focus for the discipline, namely the broader study of moral meanings across and beyond religious traditions.
Religious orders and congregations are being caught up by their own history. For the Netherlands, this has been the case since the spring of 2010, when Dutch media began to report on numerous cases of sexual abuse of minors committed by representatives of the Dutch Roman Catholic Church. Not a trace of this all occurs in recent general historiographies on the church or religion in the Netherlands, while such violations are but scantily considered in the historiography of religious communities. This raises the question of how this could be. In answering that question, we will analyze the perspectives that have guided and continue to guide historical research into religious communities. This particular field has been commanded in the past two decades by the religious themselves as well as by academically formed professional historians. To a large extent it has evolved beyond the reach of scholarly debate, due to the academic lack of interest for such institutions. First tendencies in historical research and their effect on narrative changes in the historiography of the religious are considered. Second the commemorative activities of religious communities are taken into account that reveal their self-understanding, a societal and churchly repositioning from the late 1960’s that channeled the religious’ new narratives on the past. We concentrate on the role of such narratives in processes of (revised) self-historicizing where new narratives began to dominate the actual past. A case study of the Dutch Dominicans elucidates to what extent their repositioning from the latter half of the 1960’s relied on a form of self-historicizing that involved reinventing, as it were, themselves, their own identity, and their vocation. The notion of self-historicizing implies the selective process of appropriating certain aspects from the past, while excluding others. With the religious this took shape through processes of resourcement that enabled them to recreate their so-called ‘authentic’ identity and vocation by foregrounding a ‘desired legacy’ primarily expressing who they wished to be. It is the contention of the authors that this caused them to lose perspective of their actual history, including the ‘undesired legacy’ that could pose quite a challenge to the more positive self-images. Historians should thus be wary of defining legacy in terms of what the religious themselves view as ‘desired.’ Alternative views offered by others who have had experiences with the religious in different capacities should also be considered. This calls for a new narrative of religious communities, designed to add depth to the formerly introvert perspective on one’s own community, one’s own institution and its specific idiosyncrasies, by means of memories and experiences of those whom the religious directly interacted with in daily life and work.
This study was conducted for the purpose of understanding how functional the religious narrative is in establishing and maintaining the female piousness in modern life. Participant observation was performed during the religious communions organized by women, and the obtained data were scrutinized via the means provided by the narrative discourse analysis. In the research we carried out, it was found out that the subjects considered by the opinion leaders to be religiously important were discussed in these communions, that religious narratives were frequently analyzed in the conversations among women, and that they were interpreted and actualized by depending on the basic principles of the religious group they belonged to. The narrative was interpreted within a rational system by the female opinion leader of the group, and an absolute obedience to the Guide of the Path was legitimized.