Shanghai University hosted an academic seminar on "Chinese Documents and Sinicization of Christianity," Nov 26, covering topics of the relation between Chinese documents and Sinicization of Christianity, and the management and research of Chinese Christian documents.
The sponsors hold that Chinese Christian documents provide abundant information that can be used to study the history and ideology of Christianity in China.
Li Jianxin, the editorial director of "Studies on World Religions," a journal published by the Institute of World Religions (IWR) of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences , states in the opening address that the traditional method to study Chinese religions is to study the five major religions individually and he hopes that the study can be more detailed and deeper. The future studies should become internationalized and figure out the course of the studies on Chinese religions in the past around century to present the achievements through the document database of Chinese Christianity.
The database will form a bibliographic database based on the Chinese Christian documents released before the year 1949 in the short term and aim to build a full-text database in the long term. It will provide a bibliography covering the Chinese Christian documents collected in the world.
Professor Tao Feiya from the Department of History of Shanghai University introduces the origin, development, construction and new material of the document database as well as the relations between the establishment of the database and the research on Sinicization of Christianity.
He adds that the principal foundation of Sinicization of Christianity lies in transforming interpreting Christianity in the western languages into Chinese and integrating Christianity into Chinese languages and cultures.
Other scholars from universities like Fudan University and Wuhan University give speeches covering the studies on the Bible, missionaries and famous Christians in the history as well as Catholicism, etc.
According to the sponsors, the first academic seminar was conducted at Shanghai University in 2013. The seminar published two conference proceedings that have been included in "Journal of the Study on Religion and History."
Translated By: Karen Luo
