In recent years, scholars of modern and contemporary Chinese religion have turned their
attention to the subject of “redemptive societies”, a term coined by Prasenjit Duara in 2001
to refer to groups such as the Yiguandao, the Daoyuan, the Tongshanshe , the Wushanshe,
and others which had a major socio-religious impact during the Republican period.
Spiritually authoritative or sacred texts play a number of crucial roles within redemptive
societies. First and foremost, of course, they record and codify a redemptive society’s
beliefs and rituals and are thus key sources for the analysis of these aspects of a specific
religious system. As obvious as this may appear, such analyses have not been carried out
for many of these texts, which more commonly serve as quarries in which to collect data
on the organizational structure or social and political history of a particular group. Research
that takes the doctrinal systems encoded in modern redemptive societies’ sacred
texts seriously has been fairly rare.
We have therefore put together an international team of scholars from Europe, Taiwan,
Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Japan to focus on the textual and contextual histories of
redemptive societies, with an eye toward giving their past – and their future – the attention
they deserve.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:16956 |
| Date | 21 February 2018 |
| Creators | Clart, Philip |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-168683, qucosa:16868 |
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