China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future (review)

Abstract

This collection of essays is from a conference, by the same name, held at the University of San Francisco in honor of Edward J. Malatesta, S.J., in October, 1999. The essays cover a range of topics from Christianity as the universal teaching from the West and revelation in Confucian and Christian traditions to Hungarian missionaries to China in the twentieth century and church-state relations in Hong Kong after 1997. Several of the essays deal with the Jesuit missionaries in the late Ming-early Qing period including those by Erik Zurcher, John W. Witek, Han Qi, Robert Entenmann, Claudia von Collani, Paul A. Rule, Nicolas Standaert, and Li Tiangang. These essays cover such diverse topics as the image of Europe in China and its impact on the Chinese, cultural transmission, the question of whether heaven speaks, and the Rites Controversy in seventeenth-century Sichuan.