Blessed Are the Meat Eaters: Christian Antivegetarianism and the Missionary Encounter with Chinese Buddhism

Reinders, Eric

doi:10.1215/10679847-12-2-509

Cited by 31 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…European Christians' “inculturation” uses food as enticement for the purposes of conversion. Eric Reinder's analysis of 19th‐century Christian missionaries to China details how a Christian pro‐meat eating agenda became a rigid anti‐vegetarian stance marking Christians as “different” or “changed” from Chinese non‐believers (Reinders ). These often brutalizing strategies and outcomes, including erasures of local cultures and sometimes by syncretism, are publicly resisted by many evangelists today who advocate “contextualized” food practices.…”

Section: Global: Inculturation/contextualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As current research, socio‐cultural studies push beyond Christian and Jewish analyses of contexts and politics via sacred meals (Feeley‐Harnik ) scholarship in American religious cultures addresses Father Divine's communion banquets informed by New Thought (Griffith ). Pressing borders further to questions of spiritual nourishment for disabled and queered bodies (Eiesland ; Heyward ), missionized bodies draw new interpretations along Buddhist foodways (Reinders ). But the future table of scholarship draws fuller socio‐cultural analyses embodied and contested in South American, Asian, African, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and other global believers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Christianity and Food: Recent Scholarly Trends

Patterson

Banks

2013

Religion Compass

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Today's scholarship on Christianity's relationships with, to, and through foods, performatively, theologically, and ethically, must address global constituents and claims. Recent scholarship on Christianity and food moves from the usual markets of textual research, socio‐cultural histories, and ethnography to more interdisciplinary approaches stirred by global Christian communities and concerns. This article highlights shifts in more traditional, field‐related scholarship about Christianity and food while demonstrating why global Christian perspectives not only build from that research but also push beyond it. The field‐related scholarship is reviewed using four frames or categories, offered as organizing and heuristic help. They are the following: socio‐cultural and comparative; lived religion and ethnography; feminist, womanist, and liberatory; and global. Two types of material broadly inform these frames: historical and textual, and ethnographic and lived or practiced religion. The current and future diversity, needs, and claims of global Christian communities and contexts cannot be contained or wedged into scholarship traditionally bound to these field‐situated approaches. Scholarship related to Christianity, and food must embrace interdisciplinary and innovative strategies shared among world‐wide scholars and practitioners. From questions about community identity, to celebratory feasting and observant fasting during, cultural and seasonal cycles, including Eucharist and earth care, the future of research in global Christianity and food promises a feast of possibilities. Scholars will find a rich range of challenging issues involving faith and practice tuned to global viewpoint on ritual and performance, theologies, colonial resistances, and global alliances and politics.

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Section: Global: Inculturation/contextualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Christianity and Food: Recent Scholarly Trends

Patterson

Banks

2013

Religion Compass

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“…9 In literature, many authors have used the English word soul as a translation of the Chinese character for linghun (Yan, 2002). These words, however, have different meanings in different contexts: Soul has a deeply religious association that is strongly connected with notions of the afterlife, whereas linghun is a form of "intelligence soul" (Reinders, 2004) and emphasizes the essence of a human being or society, with its freedom of will and independent spirit. Linghun as used by Meng Xi not only is a personal vocabular preference but also indicates a profound significance within the Chinese social context.…”

Section: Incest Dating Violence and Feminismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Violence and Desire in Beijing

Wang

2007

Violence Against Women

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In Mainland China, there is a lack of public awareness of and systematic research on dating violence and incest. This article fills a gap in the research in this area by examining a woman's lived experience of father-daughter incest and dating violence. The article adopts the standpoint of third-wave feminists and highlights women's agency and resistance to abuse. Meng Xi, the subject of the case study in this article, is regarded as a "survivor" rather than a "victim," and her various strategies of resistance--in particular, how she talks about her body and linghun (intelligence soul), and uses the two as sites of resistance--are examined. The article sheds light on the desire and sexuality of women in contemporary China, and especially the struggle between spiritual and material pursuits.

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“…Although Eric Reinders's Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies (2004) gives undivided attention to missionary writing in the nineteenth century, it leaves the formational period unexplored 7 . Focusing on the period 1850–1914 and concerned with missionaries’ impressions and representations to their constituencies at home, Reinders reads a selection of late nineteenth-century works on the Chinese empire during its decline, sped along by British imperial pressure 8 .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Civilized Depravity: Evangelical Representations of Early-Nineteenth-Century China and the Redefinition of “True Civilization”

Fischer

2015

Victorian Literature and Culture

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In the first few decadesof the nineteenth century, the experience of missionaries among peoples as diverse as the ancient civilizations of India, the highly organized Zulu kingdoms, and the cannibal tribes of the South Seas had sparked a national debate concerning whether or not the “civilization of the heathen” was necessary before they could be converted, or whether Christianity would be the best means of civilizing them. Unresolved as far as public policy was concerned, this question entered discussions of the 1835 Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), a committee convened to address problems arising between British settlers and indigenous communities, including important trade sites in Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific. As with several other areas where significant British imperial pressure never took the form of direct colonial rule, the trade ports in China fell outside the committee's explicit considerations. Along with forbidding foreign settlements, Chinese culture did not fit the terms or assumptions of the committee's conversation. Since the first Jesuit mission to China in the late sixteenth century, there had been little doubt in Europe that Chinese civilization was far advanced. As a tightly controlled bureaucratic state confident of its own position as the Middle Kingdom of the world, China simply did not work within the discourse of civilization. This essay explores one attempt to adjust the terms of that British discourse in order to accommodate a civilized China.

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Blessed Are the Meat Eaters: Christian Antivegetarianism and the Missionary Encounter with Chinese Buddhism

Cited by 31 publications

References 17 publications

Christianity and Food: Recent Scholarly Trends

Christianity and Food: Recent Scholarly Trends

Violence and Desire in Beijing

Civilized Depravity: Evangelical Representations of Early-Nineteenth-Century China and the Redefinition of “True Civilization”

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