《神州交流》Chinese Cross Currents

Foreword: Culture and Religion:
Past Approaches,
Present Globalisation,
Future Challenges

Vol. 1, No. 1, January-March 2004

For its inaugural issue, Chinese Cross Currents presents to its readers a dossier in which scholars from China and overseas reflect on one of the most important issues of world history, both in China and abroad: "Culture and Religion."

As it is generally admitted, modern times began, in China as in the West, around the sixteenth century of the Common Era. It was a time when navigators from European countries reached out to the shores of southeast China. With them was Francis Xavier (1506-1552), a Jesuit missionary from Navarre, in Spain, who died on Shangchuan Island off the coast of Guangdong province.

The eleven years (1541-1552) that Francis Xavier spent in Asia were years of intense "European Renaissance" in which religious controversies were also embroiled with cultural and political conflicts. At that time, Europe, although being primarily concerned by the rediscovery of the antique roots of its many cultures, ventured nevertheless East and West across the seas in search for new "discoveries" in the World - and also for new markets. Some authors, like Geoffrey C. Gunn, whose recent book is reviewed in this issue, interpret this "Eurasian exchange" as a "First Globalisation."

Being a man of his time, Xavier realised, only after he reached Japan in 1549, that for the Christian faith to grow in any place it must equally respect local cultural roots. For his actions and words to bear fruit in Japan, he was convinced that he should first go to China.

With Francis Xavier's missionary endeavours in East Asia, the question of " Culture and Religion" reached a new climax. Since then, his "awakening" continues in various ways, even to challenge present day research on "Culture and Religion". And all the more so as seen even in today's "Global Village" where local cultures struggle to survive while the "quest for meaning" remains widely spread.

In present day China, the issue of "Culture and Religion" has not lost its significance, not least through the fact that most of the great religious traditions of Mankind have differently but truly left their mark on general Chinese civilisation and are still present in modern Chinese society.

From a recent international symposium organised in 2002 by the Macau Ricci Institute on "Culture and Religion", the Editorial Committee of Chinese Cross Currents has selected three papers which are particularly interesting for the window that they give on the current situation in China. Professor You Xilin reflects on the dual meaning that Christianity, albeit still considered as foreign to Chinese culture, can play in Chinese modernisation. In a second paper, Professor Wang Xiaochao presents his view of the contribution that Christianity could make in raising civic morality in Chinese society for the next century. Finally, Dr. David A. Palmer examines the popular Chinese qi gong practices as being a "modernisation of meditative traditions in Contemporary China".
But the issue of "Culture and Religion", nowadays as in the past, is by no means specific to China. To give a broader scope to the present day relevance of this dossier, the Editorial Committee has, with the permission of the original editor, selected two other articles related to the question of whether we live in a time of "clash of civilisations". Jack Miles comments on the urgent need to take into account the religious traditions of particular other countries, and Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic, stresses the importance of recovering "a sense of the Transcendent" for today's societies and cultures to be freed from the present predicament of the world.

Yves Camus, Director