Christianity and Imperial Culture: Chinese Christian Apologetics in the Seventeenth Century and Their Latin Patristic Equivalent (Studies in Christian Mission)

Christianity and Imperial Culture: Chinese Christian Apologetics in the Seventeenth Century and Their Latin Patristic Equivalent (Studies in Christian Mission) Review

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This volume is a study of the writings of a group of Chinese Christian apologists in the 17th century, focusing on Xu Guangqi. Eleven of his shorter writings are included in Chinese and in translation. The first part of the book is devoted to a study of Latin Christian apologists within the Roman Empire to provide a comparison for the analysis of Xu Guangqi's work. Minucius Felix, Tertullians and Lactantius are shown to have faced, in regard to imperial power and Graeco-Roman culture, a situation comparable to that of Xu Guangqi, Li Zhizao and Yang Tinqyun in regard to imperial power and culture in the late Ming period. The final chapters of the book reconsider general issues of confrontation and adaptation in the inculturation of Christianity.

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Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance (Joe R. and Teresa Lozana Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture)

Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance (Joe R. and Teresa Lozana Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture) Review

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With a riotous mix of saints and devils, street theater and dancing, and music and fireworks, Christian festivals are some of the most lively and colorful spectacles that occur in Spain and its former European and American possessions. That these folk celebrations, with roots reaching back to medieval times, remain vibrant in the high-tech culture of the twenty-first century strongly suggests that they also provide an indispensable vehicle for expressing hopes, fears, and desires that people can articulate in no other way.

In this book, Max Harris explores and develops principles for understanding the folk theology underlying patronal saints' day festivals, feasts of Corpus Christi, and Carnivals through a series of vivid, first-hand accounts of these festivities throughout Spain and in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Peru, Trinidad, Bolivia, and Belgium. Paying close attention to the signs encoded in folk performances, he finds in these festivals a folk theology of social justice that--however obscured by official rhetoric, by distracting theories of archaic origin, or by the performers' own need to mask their resistance to authority--is often in articulate and complex dialogue with the power structures that surround it. This discovery sheds important new light on the meanings of religious festivals celebrated from Belgium to Peru and on the sophisticated theatrical performances they embody.

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And Then the End Will Come: Early Latin Christian Interpretations of the Opening of the Seven Seals (Studies in Medieval History and Culture)

And Then the End Will Come: Early Latin Christian Interpretations of the Opening of the Seven Seals (Studies in Medieval History and Culture) Review

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This work examines a centuries-long intellectual tradition in the early Latin church linking the imagery associated with the opening of the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse with programs of ecclesiastical expansion and ascetic reform.

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