For our Roman Catholic readers, a special mass is to be held tonight at the St Ignatius Cathedral to mark the liturgical feast of Saints Peter and Paul. The announcement from the Italian Cultural Institute:
The IIC Shanghai is glad to announce the celebration of the Holy Mass in Chinese language with the Holy Lesson in Italian language, which will be held on Wednesday 29th June 2011, at 19:00 at St.Ignatius Cathedral, XuJiahui.more ›
Beijing's embattled Shouwang Church has been rocked by a split in its leadership team of more than a dozen, marked by the departure of one pastor, one preacher and two deacons, according to the South China Morning Post.
An unregistered church in Beijing has been making headlines this month for attempting to continue unauthorized services outside the control of authorities. The saga continued today as dozens of church members were detained after attempting to attend a banned Easter service. The church, Shouwang, was evicted from its former location after refusing to come under the direct supervision of the Chinese government. An unidentified church member reported that the pastor and church leaders have also been placed under house arrest.
Elder Fu Xianwei (傅先伟长老), the chairman of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (三自爱国运动) and the highest-ranking official of the state-approved Protestant church, has been spotted yesterday in Singapore attending a conference organised by the bishops of the Anglican Global South, a grouping of 20 provinces in the southern hemisphere, representing three-quarters of the world's 75 million Anglicans that has been threatening to break away from the Church of England over doctrinal disagreements over homosexuality and the role of gay laity and clergy.
Yet another diplomatic tussle looms large between Beijing and the Vatican in the days ahead. It all started when the Catholic News Agency sent out the following really short story a few days ago, alleging that the Bible is "among objects prohibited at the 2008 Beijing Olympics":
Organizers of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing have published a list of “prohibited objects” in the Olympic village where athletes will stay. To the surprise of many, Bibles are among the objects that will not be allowed.more ›
... at least that is what Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas would have us believe (h/t to Danwei). She recently wrote in to China Daily columnist Raymond Zhou after reading his opinion piece on recent comments by Chinese celebrity Sun Haiying (孙海英) who not too long ago ignited a huge debate with his comments that homosexuality was unequivocally "criminal in nature" ("同性恋就是犯罪“):
Dear Raymondmore ›
A 30-year old man in Guangzhou appears to have died of exhaustion after a three-day Internet gaming binge. Paramedics tried to revive him at the cybercafe but failed and he was declared dead on the spot.
... There are no great or small rights but only democracy and totalitarianism. I say that in my vocabulary, there is no China versus outside but only justice versus injustice; there is no Chinese versus foreigners but only good versus evil. There is no inside or outside, no east or west. I will dedicate myself to pursue truth, goodness and beauty; I will oppose all that is false, evil and ugly. I will never compromise.
Colleague: Haha, I understand. I'm not a very good CCP member, and not a very bad one either, but you probably can't say I'm a member anymore. I have not been paying my party membership fees for three years now, and haven't been keeping up with the meetings, so they probably struck my name off the list.
The Indian government on Tuesday invited six aircraft manufacturers including Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. to bid on a contract for 126 combat planes worth up to $10 billion.
In just three hours ago from a Reuters report:Three underground priests - Liang Aijun, Wang Zhong and Gao Jinbao - who have been unwilling to join China's Catholic Patriotic Church have been detained by plain clothes police in Inner Mongolia, having fled there from neighboring Hebei province, a Catholic stronghold.
Sri Lanka is fighting against the threatened beheading of a teen maid in Saudi Arabia over the death of an infant. Saving her from beheading has become one of the most urgent issues in a country where nearly everyone has worked abroad or had a relative employed overseas.
Chinese cash helps former Portuguese colony overtake US city's gaming revenues.
It has been three weeks since Pope Benedict XVI issued his first letter to mainland Chinese Catholics which stirred up a wide range of sentiments, and since then observers have been eagerly watching for the first signs of Beijing's response to the letter.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the letter’s consequences; there are people far more qualified to do that, and they will. For now, I’d just like to point out that - in a small way - the letter serves as a near total and complete repudiation of the rhetoric and methods of the Cardinal Kung Foundation. For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Kung Foundation is an American non-profit whose stated goal is support of China’s underground Catholics; in reality, the foundation and its leader Joseph Kung have spent the better part of the last two decades agitating for more division among China’s Catholics (a stance which the Pope’s letter implicitly recognizes as contrary to his and the late John Paul II’s intentions). I outline some of this in my recent profile of Jin Luxian in the July/August issue of the Atlantic.
In a very unusual letter (English translation here) addressed to the "bishops, priests, consecrated persons and lay faithful" in mainland China, Pope Benedict XVI (and he's got a cool Chinese name too - 教宗本笃十六世) has openly hoped for a renewal of relations between China and the Vatican. In the letter, the Pope noted that "there are signs, in China too, of the tendency towards materialism and hedonism, which are spreading from the big cities to the entire country" and called on Chinese believers to remember that "the new evangelization demands the proclamation of the Gospel to modern man, with a keen awareness that, just as during the first Christian millennium the Cross was planted in Europe and during the second in the American continent and in Africa, so during the third millennium a great harvest of faith will be reaped in the vast and vibrant Asian continent".
The new ultra-modern Haidian Christian Church in Zhongguancun, Beijing, is the largest church standing in west Beijing today. According to Answers.com, approximately 3-5% of the Chinese population is Christian (40 to 65 million). And while the powers that be state that only 1% of the population is Christian, western demographers say underground churches house as many as 80-100 million believers. The magazine Christianity Today, estimates that with an average 200,000 Chinese converts every year, Christianity has become the fastest growing religion in the nation, and has outpaced growth of the erm, largest political party here which boasts a membership of 70 million people.
And there's no reason that feeling should only be the province of a hyper-educated elite. Ever since studying abroad was reintroduced in the 1980s, Chinese people have had a major jones for Harvard and the rest of the Ivies. There are tons of books with Harvard as the subject, and especially popular among those are ones that tell about how a Chinese student managed to get in or raise a kid that got into Harvard.
Last week, we told you about the the big fire at Shanghai's historic 121-year-old Union Church. On Saturday, we went to the church to check on the damage. We were able to sneak onto the roof of an abandoned building next door to get some bird's eye views — and what we saw wasn't pretty. Workers are busy building scaffolding around the remains of the building, so it looks as though the church's renovation is still going to happen. But they've really got their work cut out for them.
As the world holds it's breath, teetering precariously on the cusp of the Super Bowl (well, at least in America), the wheels of the -ists keep on turning.
The Shanghai Daily ran just a caption with the attached photo. Here is what they wrote:
We're still feeling a little lazy over here at Shanghaiist headquarters — good thing other bloggers are picking up the slack. John at Sinosplice posted a nice collection of Christmas songs in Chinese.
"The Japanese have the kimono and the Koreans also have their traditional.clothing. But not the Han people, although they represent the largest of China's 56 ethnic groups," said Liu, who actively promotes cuture.
Shanghaiist only recently mastered the ins and outs of computer-based blogging and we'll be damned if there aren't already newer, hipper things come to replace it. Video blogging, or "vidblogging" as it's sometimes known, is pretty cool, and we've seen people using video-sharing sites to this end or else just embedding their videos into their blogs. China Mobile is now trying to get into mobile blogging, also known as "moblogging," where your mobile phone becomes the tool with which you update and submit content to your blog. This site explains the concept well, and Blogger, which is no longer grounded by the Internet nanny, has a moblogging service which allows you to submit photos, video, and text to a moblog they host. The moblog can either be stand-alone or else be embedded into a pre-existing blog by cutting and pasting the appropriate javascript.
Photo by theshanghaieye taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.
Photo by spiky247 taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos at shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.
