Chinese Folk Christianity and Its Possibly Missional Nature

During the last four decades, Christianity in China has grown quickly. There are about 50 million Protestant Christians in today's China. The majority of them, however, are in rural areas. This rural Christianity, or folk Christianity, is influenced by Chinese folk religion. This article explores the features and the missional nature of Chinese folk Christianity. It exposes several main features of folk Christianity, including its charismatic orientation, pragmatic concern, moral emphasis, and superstitious factors. Its main argument is that Chinese folk Christianity is missional in a situation where the absolute majority of the population is non‐Christian. Through describing and analyzing Chinese folk Christianity as biblical, historical, contextual, eschatological, and practicable, which are fundamental affirmations about the missional church, this article reaches the following conclusion: Although it is somewhat syncretic, Chinese folk Christianity, as God's people called in a particular context, has its missional nature. It is a contextualized form of Christianity. Given the particular Chinese context in participating in God's mission, it might be inevitable for Chinese folk Christianity to be syncretic to some degree. In the contexualization of Christianity, however, Chinese folk Christianity has raised some theological questions: How deeply and thoroughly contextualized can folk Christianity become? Are there limits to its contextualization? If yes, what are the limits?     

“Equal Discipleship”

Feminist theology is known for its various critical principles and methods of biblical interpretation. In the process of doing feminist biblical interpretation, feminist theologians have started to build their theological frameworks. This article takes the feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and her construction of the New Testament as an example. In her book Discipleship of Equals, Schüssler Fiorenza put forward the important viewpoint of “equal discipleship.” This viewpoint provides a dialogue between Schüssler Fiorenza and the theological concerns of women in China. Like Schüssler Fiorenza, Chinese theologians have also noted the testimonies of Chinese women Christians in the development of the church. These can help female Christians realize who they are and the significance of being a member of the church. Christian Chinese traditional culture still influences the understanding of women's identity. This will be a significant challenge and task in practising Chinese feminist theology.     

The Pan‐African Women's Ecumenical Empowerment Network in the Caribbean

The context of theological formation in the Caribbean is the diversity and crucible of cultures and in which women have played a great role and made a great impact.     

Examining Effects of Self-Efficacy on Research Motivation Among Chinese University Teachers: Moderation of Leader Support and Mediation of Goal Orientations

Utilizing the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) as the theoretical framework, this study proposed a moderated mediation model investigating the complex functioning mechanisms of how self-efficacy beliefs and leader support can be related to research motivation among Chinese university teachers. A group of 310 Chinese teachers working in different universities completed an online survey. Results from structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis revealed distinct influencing paths from the predictor variables (i.e., self-efficacy and leader support) to the outcome variables (i.e., intrinsic and extrinsic research motivation). Specifically, self-efficacy beliefs predicted both mastery and performance goal orientations; mastery goal orientation, in turn, positively affected intrinsic and extrinsic research motivation. In contrast, leader support was non-significant for the both types of goal orientations, but exerted strong direct influences on the both types of research motivation. Bootstrapping methods in SEM showed that it was primarily the mastery goal orientation that mediated the relationships between self-efficacy beliefs and research motivation. Furthermore, the results from the SEM and simple slope analysis revealed that leader support moderated the association between self-efficacy and extrinsic research motivation.     

Symbioses Can Transcend Particularisms: A Memoir of Friendship with Ralph Wendell Burhoe

Ralph Burho's paradigmatic scientific innovation is the extension of the concept of symbiosis to coadapted human genotypes and "culturetypes," centered on religion. Civilization also requires a coexistent secular arena, where religion's nearness may help prevent our natural synergistic instrumentalizations of each other from degrading to losses of respect for one another as responsible free agents. The mixed messages in the Bible's diverse stories help to preserve a richness of choices in memory as we navigate history. We science-and-religion theorists should expand our cademic base to include economics, politics, literature, and other areas, while emulating Ralph's wise and good-humored ways of drawing us together and affecting our lives.     

Transforming and Redescribing Critical Thinking: Constructive Thinking

The author describes a published symposium which debated “Is Critical Thinking Biased?” The symposium meant to address concerns about critical thinking that are being expressed by feminist and postmodern scholars. However, through the author's critique, and the symposium respondent's, we learn the participants ended up begging the question of bias. The author maintains that the belief that critical thinking is “unbiased” is based on an assumption that knowers can be separated from what is known. She argues that critical thinking is a tool which has no life of its own, it only has meaning and purpose when fallible, biased people use it (weak sense bias). She challenges the idea of a transcendental epistemological perspective, thus all knowledge is provisional and perspectival (strong sense bias). The author begins to redescribe a transformed critical thinking as constructive thinking.     

Does Differential Cohort Socialization Matter? The “Age Invariance” Hypothesis and Political Socialization

In classical and contemporary social theory alike, the key to understanding how cultural change comes about has been thought to lie in the long-term effect of differential cohort socialization. Cultural change is thought to proceed as differently socialized cohorts replace each other in the course of time. Moreover, distinct generations have been claimed to emerge. Thisarticle addresses the impact of cohort replacement and the presence of generations, including discussions of the theoretical framework underlying these concepts and the problem of disentangling age, period, and cohort effects. Analyses of Dutch survey data substantiate that cohort membership matters. Yet the impact of cohort replacement on cultural change turns out to be limited, and little evidence is found in support of the idea that specific generations arediscernible.     

论中西医结合的过程与层次

中西医结合是一个长期困扰人们的难题。中医理论研究人体外部现象的变化规律,以古代哲学思想为指导,具有整体联系、动态把握的合理内核。而目前现代医学对人体结构和功能的认识,并不能完全揭示生命现象本质,因而也不能完全解释中医现象。这种认识有一个不断发展和深化的过程,自然辩证法观点认为层次越低、结合越紧密。分子导次是具有生物意义的最低层次。人类“基因组”计划的实现可能在一个新的高度阐明人体本质,也使中医现象