Word: confucianism
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...blend with the local population and to adapt the Christian message to their ways, the visitors inevitably bring Western values with them. For instance, missionaries in Asia expect newly baptized Christians to take personal blame for their actions; that is not an easy lesson for people raised in neo-Confucian societies that emphasize group responsibility. New Christians, whose cultures have taught them to mask emotions or express them indirectly, have difficulty accepting the evangelical emphasis on a public affirmation of faith...
...current buzz word used by Catholics for the process of adapting the Christian message to local traditions is "inculturation." The idea is not new. Four centuries ago, Father Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary in China, tried to incorporate the Confucian reverence for ancestors into Catholic ritual. The Vatican quashed the experiment. Says one Catholic official in Rome who works with missionaries: "Inculturation is a difficult thing and sometimes I would say a dangerous thing. Leaving your own culture and adopting that of the people among whom you work may lead you to go too far, toward animism perhaps...
...observations are dispiriting. The underlying theme coursing through these informative volumes is that there is a Chinese character no Marxist decree can alter. The rules of the Confucian code, the ancient tradition of decorum known as the li, remain. After 30 years, the People's Republic of China is still more Chinese than Communist...
...shared a bone-deep Chineseness...Perhaps the Chineseness of both the Confucian Sage and the Marxist revolutionary is more important than the contrasts...
Here lies the true irony of Alitto's approach to his subject. His attempt to give this one man historical potency produces cartoon drawings of intellectual developments. Ultimately, Liang was not "the last Confucian" that could defend two millenia of Confucian tradition. His Confucianism was a tool, picked up relatively late in life, with which he sought to preserve China in the face of modernity. He could not stand for the old order; he chose only one of many intellectual responses to simultaneous demands of Chinese culturalism and nationalism; he failed to make any new synthesis that challenged...