Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Catholic Church. Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong“

The Catholic Church of Hong Kong with its geopolitical proximity has become the gateway or bridge for the contact between Chinese Catholics and the universal church. Due to the transfer of the territory's sovereignty to China in 1997 and the June 1989 massacre in Beijing, Hong Kong Catholics have been going out of their traditional way by involving themselves more intensively in politics. This political behavior has an important bearing on the Sino-Vatican reconciliation which is beginning to take shape after a long, difficult period of pursuit. This article aims at discussing the dual role of the Hong Kong Catholic Church in the triangle relations of China, Hong Kong, and the Vatican.

The Eighth General Synod of Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui (‘Holy Catholic Church of Hong Kong’) met from 23 to 25 June 2019 at St James's Church in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong. The Synod had been scheduled to meet from 23 to 27 June but concluded its business two days early. It normally meets every three years.

Religion and food culture are two closely related topics in the Christian discourse and have been the subject of extensive anthropological research. This paper takes the Boston Chinese Catholics as a case study, and it adopts an ethnographic research methodology to explore the ways in which the sense of belonging develops in the Church community, based on the analysis of food culture in this context. Chinese Catholics in Boston are mainly Fujian and Hong Kong immigrants, and the class, status, and economic differences between these two communities are well apparent. The Boston Chinese Catholic Church divides food into sacred and secular. During religious rituals, all Catholics share the sacred food, the Holy Body and the Holy Blood, which symbolize the unity of the Catholic Church. In everyday life, Fujian Catholic and Hong Kong Catholic community members follow the dietary habits of their community to maintain a division between each community’s traditions. Over the years, the Boston Chinese Catholic Church has developed a flexible strategy—externally consistent and internally differentiated—to maintain the unity of the Church while embracing the cultural differences of its members. This flexible strategy has also influenced the way in which the Boston Chinese Catholic Church operates. This study indicates that we need to place more emphasis on the diversity and complexity of the members of the overseas Chinese Catholic Church and the specificities of the Catholic religion’s discourse so that we can better understand the overall practices and methods of overseas Chinese Catholicism. This study is a catalyst for the study of overseas Chinese Catholicism, as well as the study of food culture, religion, community, and identity in that context.

Purpose National identification among young people and the issues about how national education should be conducted have been the significant topics when the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was entering its third decade of the establishment. This paper was written based on data the authors obtained upon participation in a project organized by the Centre for Catholic Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The project was carried out after the official curriculum, known as the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide, was shelved due to popular resentment. The project aimed at capturing the timely opportunity for substantial resources available for school-based operation of moral and national education and developing an alternative curriculum about teaching national issues and identification for Catholic Diocese and Convent primary schools to adopt. This paper aims to investigate the nature of this Catholic Project and examines the extent to which it is a counterhegemonic project or one for teaching to belong to a nation (Mathews, Ma and Lui, 2007). It assesses the project’s possible contribution to citizenship and national education in Hong Kong, since the withdrawal of the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide. Design/methodology/approach The authors of this paper worked in an education university of Hong Kong and were invited to be team members of this Catholic Project. The role comprised proposing topics for teacher training, conducting seminars, giving comments to teaching resources, observing and giving feedback to schools that tried out the teaching and designing/implementing an evaluative survey and conducting follow-up interviews with involved parties such as teachers and key officials of the Catholic Centre. Given this, the research involved can be perceived as action research. This paper was written up with both the qualitative and quantitative data the authors collected when working the project. Findings This paper reported a Catholic citizenship training project with the focus on a Catholic school project on preparing students to understand the nation by learning national issues analytically. The ultimate goal was to ensure teachers in Catholic primary schools could lead the students to examine national issues and other social issues from the perspective of Catholic social ethics. Though the project arose after the failure of the government to force through its controversial national education programme, this paper found that instead of being an alternative curriculum with resistance flavour, the project was basically a self-perfection programme for the Catholic. It was to fill a shortfall observed of Catholic schools, namely, not doing enough to let students examine social and national issues with Catholic social ethics, which, indeed, had a good interface with many cherished universal values. In the final analysis, the project is not a typical national education programme, which teaches students to belong to a nation but an innovative alternative curriculum transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions as advanced by western literature (for example, Gramsci, 1971; Freire, 1970; and Apple, 1993). Originality/value The paper contributes to the literature of Hong Kong studies and citizenship education studies. The results of such an innovative endeavour, which captures and capitalizes the opportunity and resources for developing a national education curriculum in school-based manner. Attention was paid to the endeavour’s nature and its possible contribution to the knowledge, policies and practices of citizenship and national education in Hong Kong amidst deep social transformations. In particular, the paper can add to the specific literature about Hong Kong’s citizenship and national education development since the withdrawal of the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide. Using an empirical example of Asian schooling and society, analysis of this paper illustrates the way in which development of an alternative curriculum is more innovative and interesting, transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions.

Based on both documentary research and a series of interviews, this study retrieves the ecumenical spirit of the beginning of the dismissed Tsuen Wan Ecumenical Social Service Centre (TWESSC), a Christian non-governmental organization. Early ecumenical praxis among six local churches (including one Catholic parish) testified to the need to work for (and with) the poor and to advocate for social justice, as promoted and sponsored by the World Council of Churches in the early 1970s. The TWESSC was recognised as an effective activist group in colonial Hong Kong, but was disbanded in 1997, due to conflict between the executive committee (including church representatives) and its frontline social workers and its service recipients. This article contributes to the study of ecumenism in Hong Kong in two ways. Firstly, it examines the emergence of the ecumenical movement in Hong Kong against the broader background of the involvement of church groups in community development. Secondly, it explores how the Hong Kong churches were occupied by the subvention of frontline services by the government since the 1980s, and how they sought to silence dissenting voices in the ecumenical movement.

SECULARITY AND SCIENCE: What Scientists around the World Really Think about Religion by Elaine Howard Ecklund et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 352 pages. Hardcover; $31.95. ISBN: 9780191926755. *I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s under conservative evangelicalism, which means my father's bookshelf was full of creation/evolution texts, and we never missed Ken Ham when he came to town. The conflict narrative between science and religion was in full force then, and it remains with us today (if slightly diminished). Religious conservatives weren't the only ones talking secularization, though. Scholars such as Peter Berger had observed decades earlier that science often acts as a carrier of secularization. Berger lived long enough, however, to see that secularization did not unfold as expected, and he modified his view near the close of the millennium to indicate that secularization is not a uniform process. Rather, we observe "multiple modernities " marked by various trajectories of secularization and religious growth. *Such is the essential backdrop for Secularity and Science: What Scientists around the World Really Think about Religion. Here, Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and her team ask a simple and compelling question: If science is linked to secularization--as the story so often goes--what do scientists actually think about religion? The answer comes via survey research on 20,000 physicists and biologists in France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as 600 in-depth interviews. The result is an impressive and wide-ranging report not only on the status of religion and science in a global perspective, but also on several theoretical and practical considerations surrounding the secularization debate. As sociologists they take care to address hierarchical and institutional matters (i.e., academic rank, university status and prestige, levels of science infrastructure, etc.), and as scholars of religion they investigate how religious factors vary across national contexts (i.e., definitions of religion and spirituality, religious characteristics of populations, state-church relations, antagonism between scientists and the general public, the place of religion in the scientific workplace, etc.). Each country or region receives a focused chapter, briefly summarized below. *The United States (chap. 3, "The 'Problem' of the Public") is characterized by a soft secularism in which 65% of scientists believe in God. US scientists aren't particularly antagonistic to religion, but significant conflict between scientists and the public exists due to the large, politically active, conservative Christian population. This public issue plays a role in undermining the US scientific enterprise. *In the United Kingdom (chap. 4, "'New Atheists' and 'Dangerous Muslims'"), 57% of scientists believe in God. The UK is characterized by a unique dynamic in which new atheist scientists speak at the popular level while at the same time half of the country's scientists originate outside the UK, often bringing religious values with them. UK biologists expressed concern about a growing Muslim population and implications for some realms of scientific thought (e.g., evolution). *In France (chap. 5, "Assertive Secularism in Science"), 49% of scientists report belief in God. French secularism is based on laïcité (freedom from religion) and the state actively excludes religion from public life. The result is that dialogue between religion and science is difficult to sustain, with laïcité disproportionately affecting Muslim women in science. *Eighty percent of scientists in Italy (chap. 6, "A Distinctively Catholic Religion and Science") believe in God. Conflict between science and religion is a non-issue, largely due to the monolithic nature of cultural Catholicism ("Everyone's Catholic. And nobody cares," p. 7). Even non-Catholic scientists, many of whom identify as "spiritual but not religious," tend to see religion and science as separate realms in what could be called "a version of religious modernity." Scientists belonging to certain Catholic networks appear to have better access to jobs, funding, and other opportunities. *In Turkey (chap. 7, "The Politics of Secular Muslims"), 94% of scientists say they believe in God. Turkish scientists broadly believe in God but do not see themselves necessarily as personally religious. They observe little conflict between science and religion when Islam is considered broadly, but express concern about the ascendancy of a political form of Islam which threatens academic freedom. Many Turkish academics are leaving the country, and scientific infrastructure has suffered in recent years. *In India (chap. 8, "Science and Religion as Intimately Intertwined"), 90% of scientists report belief in God, and religious affiliation among scientists is higher than in the general public. India is a growing scientific superpower, and religion is so "in the air" that Indian scientists often make connections between religion and science without even noticing. A number of Indian scientists observe that the "conflict" between religion and science is a Western construction. *In Hong Kong and Taiwan (chap. 9, "A Science-Friendly Christianity and Folk Religion"), 90% (Taiwan) and 74% (Hong Kong) of scientists believe in God or gods. Like India, affiliation among scientists is higher than in the general population. Both of these regions' education systems have been influenced by Christianity, and scientists in Hong Kong speak of meeting faculty and administrators in the sciences at Christian churches. Despite the influence of Christianity, the Western science and religion conflict narrative is not strong. *These summary points hardly do justice to the scope of the authors' project, but they do highlight something that they themselves hold up as a central finding: namely, that conflict between religion and science is an invention of the West. The data indicate that a conflict perspective animates just one-third of scientists in the US, the UK, and France, with the remaining countries evincing much lower numbers. Rather, science and religion are most commonly viewed as different aspects of reality--independent of one another--a view embraced by both nonreligious and religious scientists. Regarding religious scientists, the authors report that from a global perspective there are many more than commonly assumed. Even scientists themselves consistently underestimate the proportion of their colleagues who are religious. *Overall, the book provides tremendous insight, thanks to rich quantitative and qualitative data, into how national and social contexts shape and interact with scientists' views of religion. No other study of this magnitude exists, and that fact alone makes it a remarkable achievement worthy of examination. Its greatest strength lies in the treatment of each country and region, with effective data and storytelling illuminating the relation between science and religion in that location. *The primary weaknesses are the minimal synthesis of cross-national data and the limited discussion of how results fit within the larger secularization debate (which the authors use to frame the book). Secularization themes are treated on a country-by-country basis, but only seven pages of the concluding chapter attempt a synthesis, and the discussion is largely practical. Given the expertise of the authors involved, it feels like a missed opportunity for a more theoretically rich discussion. I would like to have seen, for example, discussion on whether the independence model (as opposed to the conflict model) is itself linked to secularization. The majority of the world's scientists may be at least nominally religious, but without explicit philosophical and theological work to engage science, isn't it probable that the independence model might just as easily contribute to secularization as oppose it? In other words, whose secularity are we talking about? Strong atheists may view independence as accommodating religion; the highly devout may interpret it as another facet of secularity. *That said, the book is an empirical rather than a theoretical work, and an excellent one at that. The data are rich enough for readers well versed in the secularization debate to incorporate them into their own hypotheses. The primary message, supported by a wealth of rigorous data, indicates that global scientists are more religious than we often realize, and that narratives around science and religion in the US are not the only ones requiring our attention. *Reviewed by Blake Victor Kent, Westmont College Department of Sociology, Santa Barbara, CA 93108.