Editorial

Further, to be a Christian in Asia, like being Hindu, Buddhist or Daoist, is not solely a religious reality; it is as well a reality inseparable from history, politics, culture, ideology, and so on. Hence, by taking a strictly religious approach to the existence of Christians and Christian communities in this continent, one may fail to capture the multifarious ways in which Christianity has embedded itself in the many layers of the lives of the people, resulting in unique forms and expressions, in particular historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts. Encounters with Christianity were not without conflict and confrontation, as the case of the seveneteenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese Rites Contro- versy illustrates.2 Christianity is, then, part of what Sinologist Prasenjit Duara calls the ‘circulatory history’ of civilizations—a transcultural and transnation- al flow and intermixture of ideas, traditions, practices, and so on.3 We do not see Christianity simply as a body of doctrine but rather as part of the lived social realities of Chrsitians in Asian contexts with their own distinct histories and cultural interactions. Our image of the Christian lags far behind the reality of developments that have taken place. There is, then, the need to investigate critically the ways in which Christianity has encountered peoples in Asia and has affected their lives, institutions, cultures, and traditions, for which the con- tributions of many disciplines are required.