LIAM Matthew Brockey is a junior scholar, assistant professor at Princeton University’s history department. He does not claim to present the history of the Catholic Church in China as such, but his study belongs to the genre of the history of the Church’s mission, focusing on the missionary enterprise of the Jesuits, from 1579 on, first under the Vice-province of Japan, and from 1619 on, under the Vice-province of China. The study ends with the proscription of Christianity by Emperor Yongzheng in 1724, resulting with the expulsion of almost all the missionaries. The book title is a literary reference to the Journey to the West (Xiyouji), because Brockey sees a parallel between the trip of Xuanzang to India and the adventurous progress of the Jesuits in China.
In the Introduction, Brockey frames the Jesuit mission into the larger context of European modern history, seeing the Jesuit mission in China as a mirror of modern Europe...
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AFTER having been put off for many years, finally in 2007 three of my books have been achieved and published: Commentaries on the Three Pillars of Late Ming Catholicism (Daofeng Shushe, Hong Kong), Cross-cultural Interpretation: Encounter between the Study of the Classics and Theology (Xinxing Chubanshe, Beijing) and One Hundred Sentences of the Holy Bible (Fudan University Press, Shanghai). Commentaries on the Three Pillars collects and annotates the theological treatises of China’s first generation of Christians, Xu Guangqi and others; Encounter between the Study of the Classics and Theology attempts to inquire into the relationship between Qing dynasty academic thinking and European “Heavenly Learning”; One Hundred Sentences of the Holy Bible mines the experiences of ordinary Chinese people in order to understand some passages of the Bible. The domain and method of each of these writings are different, but these three books...
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