Lian Xi – författare

Like many of her fellow missionaries to China, Pearl Buck found that she was not immune to the influence of her adopted home. In this book Lian Xi tells the story of Buck and two other American missionaries to China in the early twentieth century who gradually came to question, and eventually reject, the evangelical basis of Protestant missions as they developed an appreciation for Chinese religions and culture. Lian Xi uses these stories as windows to understanding the development of a broad theological and cultural liberalism within American Protestant missions.The rise of missions in nineteenth-century America was an overflow of America's religious and nationalist spirit. The development of liberalism in the mission field in the twentieth century, however, precipitated a major crisis within the American missionary enterprise. It also generated what Lian Xi calls a "reverse missionary impulse" as the liberal missionaries transmitted their own theological and cultural insights to their religious base at home. This development, he argues, became one of the chief ironies in the American Protestant efforts to penetrate and convert China. The untraditional, and often syncretic, religious and cultural views that emerged out of the missionaries' experience in the East enriched Protestant thought in America and contributed to the Modernist search for a broadened interpretation of Christianity.

Christianity has become one of the most powerful markers of identity in the mountainous borderlands of China and Southeast Asia, also known as Zomia. This region is home to tens of millions of people—including the Ahmao, the Kachin, the Lisu, and many other highlanders—all living at a far remove from the population centers of the lowlands. This volume explores how their creative engagement with Christianity has transformed their communities and reshaped their relationships with nation-states and dominant cultures.Highland Christianity brings together indigenous, in-group scholars and external researchers to examine Christianity’s complex entanglement with ethnicity and modernity across eastern Zomia. Chapters investigate mass conversions, the creation of Bible orthographies, the indigenization of Christian practice, and the tensions Christianization generated with lowland states and majority populations. Contributors highlight the dramas and ambiguities of these changes while foregrounding the creative agency of highland peoples in reworking the faith to generate cohesion, cultural capital, and renewed forms of belonging. Moving beyond colonial frameworks, this interdisciplinary volume maps the profound and ongoing transformations of communities across this borderland region. It will be an essential resource for scholars and students of world Christianity, Asian studies, and anthropology.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Aminta Arrington, Chijui Hu, Jianxiong Ma, Pum Za Mang, Lagai Zau Nan, Anh-Minh Nguyen-Dang, Yoichi Nishimoto, and Zhu Jili.

The staggering story of the most influential Chinese political dissident of the Mao era, a devout Christian who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the regimeBlood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a Chinese poet and journalist arrested by the regime in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Alone among the victims of Mao's dictatorship, she maintained a stubborn and open opposition during the years she was imprisoned. She rooted her dissent in her Christian faith--and expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets.Miraculously, Lin Zhao's prison writings survived, though they have only recently come to light. Drawing on these works and others from the years before her arrest, as well as interviews with friends, family, and classmates, Lian Xi paints an indelible portrait of courage and faith in the face of unrelenting evil.

Cartas de sangre relata la historia de Lin Zhao, una poeta y periodista china arrestada por el régimen de Mao en 1960 y ejecutada ocho años después, en la cúspide de la Revolución Cultural. Sola entre las víctimas de la dictadura maoísta, mantuvo una oposición tozuda y abierta durante sus años en prisión. Su disidencia, arraigada en su fe cristiana, la fue relatando en múltiples escritos hechos con su propia sangre, a veces en su ropa y otras en jirones de sus sábanas.Los escritos de Lin Zhao en prisión se han conservado milagrosamente, aunque no habían visto la luz hasta hace poco. El profesor de la Universidad de Duke Lian Xi pinta, a partir de estos y otros textos de años anteriores al arresto de Lin Zhao y de diversas entrevistas con familiares, amigos y conocidos, un retrato indeleble de coraje y fe ante la maldad implacable: la asombrosa historia de la disidente política más influyente de la China de Mao.