In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation, and: China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society, and: Musing with Confucius and Paul: Toward a Chinese Christian Theology
  • Franklin J. Woo (bio)
Mayfair Yang , editor. Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. vii, 449 pp. Paperback $29.95, ISBN 978-0-520-09864-0.
Daniel A. Bell . China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xi, 240 pp. Hardcover $26.95, ISBN 978-0-691-13690-5.
K. K. Yeo . Musing with Confucius and Paul: Toward a Chinese Christian Theology. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. 508 pp. Softcover $55.00, ISBN 978-1-55635-488-5.

In reviewing these three books, I look at religion (with the exception of extreme fundamentalism) in what Ninian Smart in his Gifford Lectures (1979-1980) termed the "critical age," in which he asserts that

religion cannot escape the effects of the open society. It is no longer possible for religion to be dogmatic in an unqualified way, for even if I accept the authority of a guru or of the Pope it is I who do the accepting; we have ineluctably moved to an age of pluralism and individual choice. If there are new forms of tradition they are chosen forms, and such traditionalism is no longer quite traditional. Religion has thus moved from the dogmatic to the critical age (emphasis added).1

Selectivity is an important theme in "an age of pluralism and individual choice." The idea of "selective inheritance" came from Confucian scholar Julia Ching (1934-2001).2 Her work has had its influence on me, as can be seen in this review.

Whether we think of China as a civilization or a nation state, there appears to be noticeable continuity in China's cultural behavior as it metamorphoses from the former to the latter. Despite more than a century of state formation (etatization) under the onslaught of the modern world, some things in China do not essentially change. Though itself imperceptibly changing, Chinese cultural tradition as a totality for millennia tends not to tolerate challenges to its time-tested way of life.

Mayfair Yang

Mayfair Yang is a professor of religious studies and East Asian languages and culture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the director of Asian studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her book Chinese Religiosities: Affliction of Modernity and State Formation is a collection of a dozen complementary, perceptive essays from a 2005 scholarly conference she helped to coordinate. [End Page 349] These essays show how both imperial China and the modern Chinese state have consistently guarded against-or have used perceived heterodoxical views and practices that may, or actually do, threaten-the existing social order of the time. We can see that rather than a separation between state and religion, common in Western countries, in the Chinese context religion and state are regarded as integral parts along a continuum. In a volume by Julia Ching that highlights (as does Mayfair Yang) the popular religions of China and argues that

while China never produced a Western-type religion, one can find in the Chinese tradition what is functionally the equivalent to religion or religions in the West, and that such Chinese religions, much less distinct from the rest of Chinese culture than Western religions and Western culture, have much to tell us about the uniqueness of the religious phenomenon itself (emphasis added).3

Not only is the religious phenomenon unique, both religion and culture are extremely complex and they seem inseparable.

Though having somewhat of a pejorative connotation, "religiosities" is the term preferred in Mayfair Yang's book to describe the different manifestations of religious phenomena that affect or are affected by China's modernization process beginning in the late nineteenth century. The European notion of religio or religion, which sees religion as a separate and distinct entity from culture, is foreign to the Chinese, nondualistic continuum of a cultural way of life. It was introduced to China through the Japanese rendering of the term into zong jiao 宗教. (In the Chinese ideograms, 宗教 can...

pdf