Suchergebnisse

Published in 1605 and selectively translated from Epictetus's Encheiridion , Matteo Ricci's Ershiwu Yan (Twenty-five Paragraphs) represented a major breakthrough in his proselytizing enterprise in China, but the precise nature of this triumph may not have been the way it has so far been understood. By examining Ricci's intricate adaptation of Stoicism to Catholicism and Confucianism, and exploring the Chinese responses to Ricci's effort, this article strives to cast light on the diverse complexities of East-West intellectual interactions in the early modern period.

Li Zhizao (d. 1630) was one of the most famous early Chinese Roman Catholics intimately associated with Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the founder of the Jesuit mission in China. In spite of his fame, Li's religious experience has not so far been adequately investigated. To understand this crucially important aspect of his life and the related early modern East-West intellectual interaction, this article looks closely into ques­tions about his conspicuously late formal entry into the Church, the peculiar circum­stances of his agreement to receive baptism in 1610, and the complex implications of his logically deduced theistic belief for both Confucianism and Christianity.

Recent research on science education has increasingly focused on the literacy challenges posed by multimodality. While students are required by government mandated syllabi to make a successful translation between different semiotic resources, there still remains a lack of research on the grammars and functionality of the specialized modalities to develop explicit instructions to improve literacy practices. This paper analyses the semiotic resource of chemical symbolism in secondary school chemistry textbooks with a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach (SF-MDA). It is argued that chemical symbolism is far from a jargon or mere shorthand for language. Instead, it develops unique grammatical devices to realize sub-microscopic meaning and topological meaning, which outstrips the meaning potential of language. The current study also discusses how the SF-MDA approach could develop a visible pedagogy and improve chemistry education.

Matteo Ricci has long been celebrated as one of the greatest mediators between Europe and East Asia. To see his extraordinary experience in China from a different perspective, this article takes a close look at the many intricacies that either led to or resulted from his reliance on accommodation as an evangelizing policy. These intricacies made him both remarkably successful in what he did not necessarily plan to do and noticeably unsuccessful in what he single-mindedly set out to accomplish.