Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black, While Chinese American – A Book Review

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. By Esau McCaulley. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020. Pp. 208. $22.00.

For those who are used to my rantings, it is mainly around (Mainland) Chinese Christian theology or World Christianity. This is about something quite different: Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black. I have heard a lot about this book. As I read it, it stirred quite a lot in my own thinking as a Chinese American Christian (exiled in the UK).

Chinese Christianities Series – Notre Dame Press

I’m pleased to announce that there is a new book series being started through Notre Dame Press entitled the Chinese Christianities Series. I will be serving as its series editor, with Stephen Little of the press as acquisitions editor.

Feel free to get in contact with either of us if you have any questions.

AAR 2018: Chinese Christianities Seminar – Call for Papers

American Academy of Religion, 2018 Annual Meeting
Chinese Christianities Seminar – Call for Papers
Deadline for proposals: 1 March 2018

This seminar provides a collaborative forum for scholars of different disciplines to engage in an academic discourse about the field of Chinese Christianities. Christianity is the fastest growing religion in mainland China today, and arguably the religion of choice for a growing number of diasporic Chinese. “Chinese” is an expansive term, including mainland China proper as well as a large, linguistically, and culturally diverse diaspora, and encompassing more than a fifth of the world’s population; the Han Chinese people are sometimes described as the world’s largest ethnic group. Hence, with the increasing critical mass of Chinese Christians, there has likewise been a growing academic interest in various instantiations of Chinese Christianities, as understood across geographies (e.g., mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, North America, etc.) and groupings (e.g., house and state-sanctioned churches, Catholic, Pentecostal, etc.). Chinese Christianities both transcend and hinder a number of regional, social, religious, etc. boundaries. Over the course of these five years, this seminar will offer a unique opportunity for scholars to engage and to debate the implications of the multiplicity of Chinese Christianities with regards to the boundaries they engage.

Developing the overarching theme of “Chinese Christianities” and building on the first three years, this fourth year of the seminar will focus on various ecclesiological boundaries. We welcome papers in the following or related areas:

Chinese Christianities Mailing List

This past weekend at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, we had the inaugural session of the new Chinese Christianities program unit. I have since created a mailing list for the group and related matters on Chinese Christianities.

To subscribe to our mailing list, please send an email to sympa@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk with nothing in the body of the message and the following in the ‘Subject’ line (replacing ‘Your Name’ with your real name):

SUBSCRIBE chinese-christianities Your Name

Chinese Christianities

When I was doing my PhD, I often described my research as dealing with Chinese Christianity.  Then, when I was pitching my book to a publisher, I was asked to qualify – Chinese American Christianity or Christianity in China?  The latter, of course.  But what I have begin to realise is the ambiguity of the term ‘Chinese Christianity’ makes for a more fruitful discussion of ‘Chinese Christianities’ – in the plural.  We must think about Chinese Christianities across geographies (Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, North America, United Kingdom, etc.) and across groupings (Catholic, Protestant house churches, emerging urban churches, migrant worker churches, etc.).

There was this whole debate in the 1980s in China about where the essence of Chineseness comes from.  It couldn’t be Confucianism, per se (even though it is what most Westerners would say about China), because the May Fourth movement and the Cultural Revolution were quite lethal against the school of thought.  But it couldn’t be Communism either (although some would argue it is).  The Confucian scholar Tu Weiming argued that the problem we had was we focused on the geography of contemporary China to understand Chineseness rather than the diaspora – the periphery, he said, was the centre of cultural China.¹  Perhaps it is a mixture of contexts that is important.