Chloe Starr
Courses
REL 940
The Chinese Theologians
This course examines select readings from Chinese church and academic theologians (including Hong Kong writers and diaspora voices) to explore the nature of Chinese Christian thought. The readings cover late imperial Roman Catholic writers, early republican Protestant thinkers, high communist-era church theologians, and contemporary Sino-Christian academic theologians. Students read primary materials in English, supplemented by background studies and lecture material to help make sense of the theological constructions that emerge. The course encourages reflection on the challenges for Christian theology and life in a communist context, on the tensions between church and state in the production of theologies, and on the challenges that Chinese Christianity poses for global Christian thought.
REL 941
Chinese and Japanese Christian Literature
What effect did Christianity have on modern Chinese literature, and what sort of Christianity emerges from Chinese Christian literature? Is Endō Shusakū the only Japanese Christian writer (and does Martin Scorsese’s film do justice to Endō’s novel Silence)? This course tackles such questions by tracing the development of a Christian literature in China and Japan from late Imperial times to the beginning of the twenty-first century, with particular focus on the heyday (in China) of the 1920s and ’30s, and on the Japanese side, on Endō’s postwar novels. Using texts available in English, the course examines how Christian ideas and metaphors permeated the literary—and revolutionary—imagination in East Asia. Though rarely clearly in evidence, the influence of Christianity on Chinese literature came directly through the Bible and church education and indirectly through translated European and Western literature. The course tests the aesthetic visions and construction of the human being from texts set among Japanese samurai in Mexico to the revolutionary throes of modern China.