Call for papers for a special issue on the Church in China to be published in September 2019
In December 2015, we published a special issue of IJSCC (vol. 15, no. 4) on the Church in China, guest edited by Dr Christopher Hancock, a well-established scholar of the history and development of the Church in China, who has taught Christian Theology in China’s leading universities and is Director of Oxford House, which he described as ‘an agency that provides high-level consultancy advice on religion and contemporary geo-politics’. In the Guest editorial article of the 2015 special issue, he wrote: ‘If this special edition of IJSCC whets your appetite to read more, it will have more than justified its appearance.’ In addition to his Guest editorial, he assembled seven articles and seven book reviews on a wide variety of interesting and not generally well known subjects, which easily justified their appearance.
Interest in Sino-Christian theology is developing rapidly, and we are now planning another special issue on this important area of research.
We welcome articles from specialists who are already contributing to its development and also from authors just beginning to explore the field and wanting to publish their work in an international journal.
From our 2015 collection, we recommend that accessing the following three articles would be useful to those who decide to respond to this call and are considering what they should offer as an article:
Christopher Hancock, ‘Complexity Theory and the Chinese Church’
Paulos Huang, ‘Three Challenges and Opportunities for the Christian Church in Twenty-First-Century China’
David Jasper, ‘The Role of Sinology in the Twenty-First Century: a Western Theologian Reflects on the Development of Sino-Christian Theology’
We are also publishing in this issue of IJSCC an article on ‘Chinese Exploration of Orthodox Theology: a Critical Review’, by Professor Pan-Chiu Lai, Professor of Religious Studies in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which has a very useful critique of developments in this research area and a clear idea of the kind of further development still needed. His footnotes also provide an extensive bibliography for authors finding their way around the published work available in the field. We are particularly interested in articles on the following topics or areas of research, but other topics or areas are not excluded:
Church-State relations under the Communist leadership of Xi Jinping;
Relations between the Chinese State and the Vatican, historical or contemporary, including the recent Sino-Vatican agreement;
The political theology of the Christian Churches in China;
The history and present position of the Byzantine or Oriental Orthodox Churches in China;
The interest of Chinese theologians in theosis and Orthodox mystical theology;
The history and theological differences between the Eucharistic rites used by the churches in China.
Key deadlines
Stage 1 Abstract (approx. 500 words) of the article you would wish to submit for consideration. Please send this to [email protected] by Friday, 8 February 2019 or earlier, if you wish. (No finished articles at this stage)
Responses to abstracts will be sent out, on or around Friday, 15 February 2019.
Date for submission of your article, if invited: not later than Friday, 3 May 2019. Articles are normally 8000–8500 words long. If you estimate that your article will need to be longer, please include your reasons in the 500-word abstract you send to us at Stage 1.
Please include with your article and within the word allocation: title of article; author’s name and affiliation; brief footnotes; bibliography of books, articles or other works quoted or mentioned in your footnotes.
Also send
an abstract of the final article, max. 150–200 words,
8–10 keywords
a short note (max. 100 words), giving author’s name, post(s) held, research interests and one or two relevant examples of work already published.
If you have any immediate queries about any of the above or need futher information, feel free to contact us on [email protected].
Other material published in this issue
Korea
Please note that we are also following up in this current issue on recent developments in Korea (North and South), with Gil-Soo Han’s article, ‘Time to Make the Two Koreas One Again: Korean Christianity’s Self-Reflection and Diakonia Duties’. This includes up-to-date statistics and clarification on the denominations of the Christian Church present in Korea. We are very grateful to Gil-Soo Han for this update on the two articles previously published. Readers may like to refer back to those:
Gil-Soo Han, Joy J. Han and Andrew Eungi Kim, ‘Serving Two Masters: Protestant Churches in Korea and Money’. IJSCC 9, no. 4 (2009)
and
Gil-Soo Han and Andrew Eungi Kim, ‘The Korean Christian Movement towards Reunification of the Two Koreas: A Review in Retrospect’. IJSCC 6, no. 3 (2006).
Review articles
‘In the light of the developing concept of “theologically informed art”’, as she describes it, the review by Margaret McKerrron of the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts (ITIA), University of St Andrews, is the first of its kind in IJSCC. We are aware that the reciprocity of Theology and the Arts is coming to be studied more widely, in the way Margaret describes so well in her review, and would welcome other reviews of projects of this kind.
In contrasting form and subject, Ann Loades has contributed a perceptive and informed assessment of one of OUP’s many recent publications of the familiar Handbook style, this time the Handbook on Ecclesiology.