Book Launch of Christianity and Confucianism: Culture Faith and Politics

Part of the Politics and Society Book Launch Series at St Mary’s University.

Christianity and Confucianism: Culture, Faith and Politics by Prof Christopher Hancock, sets comparative textual analysis against the backcloth of 2000 years of cultural, political, and religious interaction between China and the West.

As the world responds to China's rise and China positions herself for global engagement, this major new study reawakens and revises an ancient conversation.

As a generous introduction to biblical Christianity and the Confucian Classics, Christianity and Confucianism tells a remarkable story of mutual formation and cultural indebtedness. East and West are shown to have shaped the mind, heart, culture, philosophy and politics of the other and far more, perhaps, than either knows or would want to admit. Christopher Hancock has provided a rich and stimulating resource for scholars and students, diplomats and social scientists, devotees of culture and those who pursue wisdom and peace today.

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Christopher Hancock is Director of Oxford House (Research Ltd) and a Visiting Professor at St Mary's University, London. Prior to this, he taught at Cambridge University, was Dean of Bradford Cathedral, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in China at King's College, London. His current work focuses on the role culture, ethics and religion play in contemporary geopolitics.

Lord Stephen Green of Hurstpierpoint, former Conservative Minister of State for Trade and Investment and Group Chairman of HSBC Holdings plc, who is also an Anglican priest.

An extraordinary piece of scholarship. It contains and constitutes an entire curriculum for comparative cultural studies, Confucian Christian dialogue, ecumenical theology, besides which it is beautifully written and a great pleasure to read. I expect that it will be a fundamental part of the curriculum in Sino Christian study programs - Richard Madsen, University of California San Diego, USA.

Hancock’s prodigious study of the long and multifarious relationship between China and the West constructs a vivid image of how intellectual and religious exchange between cultures equivocate, evolves, and harmonizes. This work brings together an impressive panoply of voices, from Confucius to Derrida, to illustrate how the global trade of ideas, as he puts it, has produced millennia of mutual formation and interaction. This deeply researched and lively work shall be among the most important contributions to our understanding of Sino Western exchange - Anthony E Clark, Professor of Chinese History Edward B Lindaman Endowed Chair, Whitworth University, USA.

One of the ways we make sense of the present is through the narration of the past. Telling the story of the complex dialogue between China's Confucian tradition and Christianity is mutually illuminating it provides a deep, historic sense of rootedness to the form and order of contemporary East West engagement. Christopher Hancock offers several fascinating historical cameos of Confucian Christian dialogue that make this volume of value to readers inside and outside the Academy. - Yang Huilin, Renmin University, Beijing, China