Pope Benedict XVI (born 1927 – ) has called Matteo Ricci [a 16th century Jesuit, 1552 – 1610] a model for a “fruitful meeting” between civilizations. Source: Catholic News Agency
America and the other Western democracies could learn much from this man, who is being considered for beatification by the
Vatican.
This wasn’t the first time I heard of the Jesuit missionary. In 1999, while my wife and I were on our honeymoon in China, she told me about Ricci. At the time, I was busy learning of Sir Robert Hart, the protagonist in my first two historical fiction novels, “The Concubine Saga”.
When we first visited Book City in Shanghai, I searched for information of Ricci but the only copy I found was in Mandarin, which I do not read.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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More than two billion Christians believe Jesus Christ was the son of God and is God.
About 13 million Jews see Christ differently. Some Jewish scholars note that though Jesus may have used the phrase “my Father in Heaven” (cf. Lord’s Prayer), this common poetic Jewish expression may have been misinterpreted as literal.
In fact, Rabbi Jacob Emden considered Jesus a righteous man, who brought the light of faith and morality to the world, but not as a Messiah.
One and a half billion Muslims, on the other hand, see Jesus as a savior and a reformist. Mission Islamsays, “Jesus is known to the Muslims as ‘Issa – this is the name for Jesus that we have been given in our scriptures.
“To Muslims, Jesus – or ‘Issa – is a savior, a reformist, the Messiah (the anointed one), the ‘Word of God’. He was elevated to heaven. He could cure the ill, raise the dead, fashion inanimate objects and blow life into them, all by the Will of God.
“We believe that the one who disbelieves in Jesus is not a Muslim, because the person who disbelieves in one of the prophets disbelieves in all of them. So Muslims believe in Jesus and in his message. His message was one with all the other messengers. In the Qur’an, it is said that God never sent a messenger to mankind except that he was sent with one warning: Worship Allah alone.”
There are even atheists that recognize Jesus Christ as an important historical person. In Atheists for Jesus, we learn that Ken Schei has a goal to rescue Jesus from the Religious Right then from the Bible.
Schei says, “I have come to have a great deal of respect for the teachings of Jesus. My respect for Jesus is not based on the Cross, but rather on the Mount—not on His death and supposed resurrection, but on His teachings as exemplified by the Sermon on the Mount.”
Now that I have established the wide variety of people and beliefs that recognize the importance of Jesus, John 8:7 in the New Testament says, “So when they continued asking him (Jesus), he lifted up himself, and said unto them, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’.”
With John 8:7 in mind, what are we to say of critics that continue to cast stones at Amy Chua, the Tiger Mother.
At Amazon.com, in some of the one-star reviews, critics often cast brutal stones heavy with opinions at Amy Chua accusing her of child abuse, being a narcissist, a psychopath, a liar and a backstabber all because Chua spent hours each week with her daughters setting high expectations and following through sometimes using insults and threats to achieve her parenting goals.
China is another example of critics casting stones, and the Western media often casts these stones at China without telling the whole story.
One example of a “stone thrower” is an anonymous Blogger that writes Understanding China, One Blog at a Time—An American in China.This Blogger mostly writes criticisms of China such as the most recent one, “Irrational Chinese and Crazy Nationalism”.
This anonymous Blogger often judges all of China based on his or her personal experiences while living and working there and this Blogger has attracted fans with similar opinions that enjoy criticizing China without much evidence and/or understanding of China, its people and its history to support those opinions.
Would Jesus Christ have approved of these individuals that so easily cast stones?If He were here today, what would He say?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
You may be surprised to learn that the British Empire started this cycle of theft in the 19th century.
In the 18th century, China was the most advanced nation on the planet. In 1793, China’s Qianlong Emperor sent a letterto King George III of Britain. The emperor made it known that, “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
Then the Industrial Revolution started in England but wasn’t felt until the 1830s or 1840s. After almost two thousand years, the West had an advantage and used it.
The author, Sarah Rose, tells the story of how, before 1848, China was the only country that knew how to grow and make tea. The British sent botanist Robert Fortune deep within China to steal plants to grow on British plantations in India.
In addition, by the 1830s, the English had become the major drug-trafficking criminal organization in the world; very few drug cartels of the twentieth century can even touch the England of the early nineteenth century in sheer size of criminality.
By the 1840s, the British and French fleets sailed into China’s rivers and destroyed its fleets forcing China to bend to the will of the West. Besides Western opium trade and the theft of China’s tea, Britain and France forced China’s emperor to allow Christian missionaries free access to Chinese everywhere.
Today, with China’s rise as a major economic and military power, it seems that theft may be changing history again but this time the wind blows from the East to the West.
However, in an attempt to keep the power, Europe and America came up with a new set of rules making the kind of theft they used in the 19th century wrong.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
In China, the concubine is a trophy showing a man’s success. No major religion on earth has had a lasting impact on the Chinese culture in more than a thousand years.
In fact, the concept that lust is a mortal sin does not exist in China unless a Chinese has adopted Christianity as his or her religion.
That does not mean China is without morals but the moral codes of China exist without the sin of mortal lust as Catholics and many devout Christians believe. In fact, I’ve known mainland Chinese that are extremely moral and would put most Puritans to shame.
The idea to focus on Robert Hart’s struggles with his Victorian, Christian morals while living in 19th century China’s concubine culture sprouted when I first read his journals and letters published by Harvard University Press.
Other influences were Anchee Min’s Empress Orchid and The Last Empress: A Novel, which go into detail about the lives of the more than three thousand concubines that belonged to the emperor.
After all, in 19th century China, the more power and wealth a man had, the more women he owned.
Another influence was the movie directed by director Zhang Yimou in 1991, Raise the Red Lantern, which “focuses on the ever-shifting balance of power between the various concubines while the husband ignores much of what is going on — taking his pleasures when he feels like it.”
For anyone that might agree with “colorado outback” or my “mother” that My Splendid Concubine should be censored, burned or put on a “DON’T BUY LIST”, Amazon Kindle offers a free preview of the first few chapters as does the Websites for My Splendid Concubine and the sequel, Our Hart, Elegy for a Concubine.
Read the first few chapters of the novel free and learn if you agree with “colorado outback” that this novel is “soft porn” and should be banned. Why spend money for something you may want to burn unless you really want to burn it?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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After first reading The Midwest Book Review for My Splendid Concubine, I thought, “Maybe I can write, but what happens if this is the only person that enjoys the book?”
Then a reviewer from the Historical Novels Review Online, wrote, “Some readers may be uncomfortable with the frank sexuality of the novel, as well as Hart’s simultaneous romantic relationship with both Ayaou and Shao-Mei, but those who are interested in unconventional romances with an out-of-the-ordinary setting will find plenty to enjoy.”
If I did not write such a lusty novel from personal sexual fantasies as “outback” claims, why did I write it?
The answer is simple.
I wanted to show the clash between different cultures and Sterling Seagrave showed me the way when he wrote in Dragon Lady, “To take the pain out of learning, his Chinese tutor suggested that (Robert) Hart might buy a concubine and study the local dialect with her.
“Hart wrote in his journal, ‘Here is a great temptation. Now, some of the China women are very good looking: You can make one your absolute possession for from 50 to 100 dollars and support her at a cost of 2 or 3 dollars per month…. Shall I hold out or shall I give way?'”
Seagrave writes in the next paragraph, “By early May he (Robert Hart) had a sleep-in dictionary, his concubine, Ayaou. He had just turned twenty; Ayaou was barely past puberty…”
Then the editors of Entering China’s Service – Robert Hart’s Journals, 1854-1863, wrote on page 8, “But anyone who reads the journals through knows that his mental struggles about women were not soon or lightly won; whether the relpase was to daydreams or to a Chinese mistriess, it caused him ambivalence and anguish.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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