Posts Tagged ‘China’

Jesuit Father Jeremy Clarke with items featured in the Boston College exhibit "Binding Friendship: Ricci, China and Jesuit Cultural Learnings." (Photo by Gary Wayne Gilbert)

Boston College Assistant Professor of History Jesuit Father Jeremy Clarke helped his undgergrad students create an exhibit that opened on Mar. 21 titled “Binding Friendship: Ricci, China and Jesuit Cultural Learnings.”

The exhibit, which highlights the history of East-West exchanges, has a number of multimedia resources to demonstrate Christian mission history in Asia.

In the 16th century, the Chinese were utilizing what at the time was advanced technology through their observatory in Beijing, Fr. Clarke said.

“In one display, we show the observatory and all the astronomical devices that they used during the time the Jesuits were there,” said student Alexander Gilman ’11.

Utilizing excerpts and outtakes from Clarke’s documentary, “Beyond Ricci: Celebrating 400 Years of the Chinese Catholic Church,” students were able to compile their own virtual history.

“One of the ways people learned about East-West cultural exchange was through six melody lines written down by a Jesuit in Beijing at that time,” said Clarke. Using these melodies as a creative point of departure, Clarke commissioned the composition of an aria that is played as people pass through the exhibit.

A number of rare books are also on display, including Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, the translations of the first three of the four canonical books of Confucianism. A group of Jesuits originally translated the philosophies of the Chinese to lead to greater understanding of Chinese thought and brought the culture to Europeans and beyond, Clarke said.

For more information, watch a video preview of the exhibit and visit the Boston College Chronicle.

Jesuit Father Jeremy Clarke with items featured in the Boston College exhibit "Binding Friendship: Ricci, China and Jesuit Cultural Learnings." (Photo by Gary Wayne Gilbert)

Boston College Assistant Professor of History Jesuit Father Jeremy Clarke helped his undgergrad students create an exhibit that opened on Mar. 21 titled “Binding Friendship: Ricci, China and Jesuit Cultural Learnings.”

The exhibit, which highlights the history of East-West exchanges, has a number of multimedia resources to demonstrate Christian mission history in Asia.

In the 16th century, the Chinese were utilizing what at the time was advanced technology through their observatory in Beijing, Fr. Clarke said.

“In one display, we show the observatory and all the astronomical devices that they used during the time the Jesuits were there,” said student Alexander Gilman ’11.

Utilizing excerpts and outtakes from Clarke’s documentary, “Beyond Ricci: Celebrating 400 Years of the Chinese Catholic Church,” students were able to compile their own virtual history.

“One of the ways people learned about East-West cultural exchange was through six melody lines written down by a Jesuit in Beijing at that time,” said Clarke. Using these melodies as a creative point of departure, Clarke commissioned the composition of an aria that is played as people pass through the exhibit.

A number of rare books are also on display, including Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, the translations of the first three of the four canonical books of Confucianism. A group of Jesuits originally translated the philosophies of the Chinese to lead to greater understanding of Chinese thought and brought the culture to Europeans and beyond, Clarke said.

For more information, watch a video preview of the exhibit and visit the Boston College Chronicle.

Jesuit Father Tom Neitzke, recently ordained in June, spent a summer two years ago in China working at a leprosarium. The journey to the remote Chinese village to stay among those suffering with leprosy and to understand their subsequent shunning by their community, Fr. Neitzke understood that there is much to learn from those among us who have the least. His reflections on the experience of being in China are below.

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Today marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci, the legendary Jesuit whose life and the example of his approach to China have been a matter of constant fascination, study and research. Jesuit Father Michael Kelly, executive director of UCANews, writes about the enduring significance of Ricci. Read his article here.

The California Province of  the Society of Jesus is striving to firm up friendship between Chinese and American scholars as a way to mark the 400^th anniversary of Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci’s death in Beijing in 1610.

Father Ricci’s first publication in classical Chinese was a treatise On Friendship in 1595. His methodology was to inculturate Christianity through respect for local culture and the formation of personal relationships.

The California Province is reviewing the Malatesta Program this week with a hope to continue such person-to-person exchange. The program’s objective is to promote academic collaboration in the area of theology and allied disciplines through exchanges between faculty and graduate students at three California Jesuit universities and those at selected Chinese universities.

It seeks in particular to support the development of religious studies programs in China and to enhance the state of theological investigation there and at the California Jesuit universities.

The idea began in the 2006-07 academic year after two faculty members from the Jesuit School of Theology were invited to lecture in China, where they met faculty from some prestigious mainland universities who expressed enthusiasm for academic exchanges.

The program was named after Jesuit Father Edward Malatesta, a biblical scholar who died in Hong Kong in 1998. He was one of the first priests from outside China to teach at Sheshan Seminary in Shanghai in 1989 and had contributed 20,000 books to the seminary’s library.

The California province’s involvement in China began in 1928 when Pope Pius XI requested the Jesuit society to provide men for the China mission.

The Malatesta Program is administered by a committee that includes two faculty members each from the Loyola Marymount University, Santa Clara University and the University of San Francisco (USF). Its office is located at the USF’s Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, co-founded by Father Malatesta and the California province in 1984.