Is China the New Roman Empire?

THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY IN MODERNIZING CHINA

Professor Fenggang Yang, a Chinese by birth and formation, is now Full Professor of Sociology at Purdue University, in the United States of America. He is also the founder and director of the «Center on Religion and the Global East» and the author of numerous works, among which the Atlas of Religion in China: Social and Geographical Contexts (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2018) and Religion in China: Survival and Revival Under Communist Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). The approach of the Lecture will be sociological, but consideration will be given not only to Peter Berger’s approach to Modernity, but also Rodney Stark’s interpretation of The Rise of Christianity. Having a profound and well documented knowledge of the present growth of Christianity in China, Professor Yang shall clarify his thesis according to which in China, despite an extremely accelerated process of modernization, the growth of Christianity is already a major/perdurable fact of social life.