Shoutout to Mengxiao Wang for organizing the workshop where I first presented this paper.
I wrote most of it on my laptop in the passenger seat of my car, as my wife drove us up the 101 to Berkeley with two toddlers in the back seats. She should probably be given a co-author credit for that.
/end
My hope with my scholarship has been to expand “religion and literature”, to get, say, the people at my alma mater Calvin College to read about Buddhist literature and other faiths in a comparative way. This article (and issue), placed in this journal, represents an invitation to those groups.
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There’s nothing wrong with that (in fact, the topic interests me greatly), but it’s a very provincial view on the subject. A much broader view would include East Asia, India, Africa, etc., and religions like Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, local cultic practices, and more.
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When I first encountered the sub field of “religion and literature” as a student, I noticed that 98% of it was about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the west since about the Renaissance. Most of it was “theological approaches to literature.”
2/
Photo showing cover of the journal Religion and Literature, plus page 1 of an offprint of "Religious and Literary Infrastructure in the Tang-Song Transition: Bai Juyi and Beyond" by Thomas J. Mazanec
Another article now out, on literary and religious infrastructure in the Tang. Pleased to see it published in the journal Religion & Literature, from Notre Dame.
Let me tell you why this one is important to me...
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Latest is out in History of Religions. "Buddhist Poetry by Its Persecutors: The Cases of Li Shen and Li Deyu." www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/.... If you don't have institutional access to this journal, feel free to reach out to me for a copy.
Yeah, and the people I know who went straight from BA to Princeton’s PhD sometimes struggled. It’s just a different game.
MA in funded program (Colorado, 09-11), helped me get my focus, make connections, understand the field. There's no way I would have had a chance at Princeton's PhD program without it.
I actually love that my baseball team is now represented by the Art-deco style guardians on the bridge over the Cuyahoga. The more they lean into that the better
Hey all, I’ll be presenting at 2 AAS events, one on Friday, one on Saturday. See below. I’ve been super limited lately as I’ve been recovering from a broken ankle for two months, so I’ll be incoherent, but come for my amazing co-presenters! #AAS2026
#Sinology🀄️📚
The problem is when other panels you want to hear are at the same time as your own.
This has happened to me like 5 years in a row.
No, it was for the humanities generally.
Yeah, that was the first thing I did: go to site, change my settings. It's just now you know you're going to start seeing these translations in students' papers.
It also remains the case that the Trump NEH will not fund work that 'promotes' "gender ideology," "discriminatory equity ideology," "support for diversity, equity, and inclusion," "diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility," or "environmental justice initiatives or activities"
Screenshot from NEH webpage, text reads: "Fellowships provide recipients time to conduct research or to produce books, monographs, peer-reviewed articles, e-books, born-digital materials, translations with annotations or a critical apparatus, or critical editions resulting from previous research. Projects may be at any stage of development. NEH encourages submissions from independent scholars and junior scholars. The 2026 Fellowships competition will only accept projects for research in American history and culture and Western civilization. Competitive applications must focus on topics in the history, culture, and government of the United States in any period from the Colonial Era to the present, or topics in Western civilization from antiquity to the present."
Fun update on National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships: they have to focus on "American history and culture and Western civilization." Sinologists et al. are no longer welcome.
www.neh.gov/grants/resea...
#Sinology 🀄️📚
Ryūchi Abé, Review of Kūkai: Japan’s First Vajrayāna Visionary by David Gardiner
William D. Fleming, Review of Printing Technologies and Book Production in Seventeenth-Century Japan by Peter Kornicki
5/end
Luke Waring, Review of The Tsinghua University Warring States Bamboo Manuscripts: Studies and Translations, vol. 2 by Edward Shaughnessy
Yuxuan Tay, Review of The World of Wu Zhao: Annotated Selections from Zhang Zhuo’s Court and Country by N. Harry Rothschild
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J. Michael Farmer, Review of A Prince of Martial Splendour in the Sixteen Kingdoms: Li Hao (351–417), Ruler of Western Liang by Dominic Declerq
Vincent Goossaert, Review of Kings of Oxen and Horses: Draft Animals, Buddhism, and Chinese Rural Religion by Meir Shahar
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Quantifying Accomplishments, Rewarding Performance: Military Bounties in Early Imperial China by Wicky W. K. Tse
Romantic Entanglements: Occidentalism, Love, and Nanshoku in Mori Ōgai’s “Maihime” by James Reichert
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Issue 146.1 of the Journal of the American Society for Premodern Asia (JASPA, formerly JAOS) has been published and can be found online at lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/jaos. Here is the content of the East Asia section.
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Director of Scholarly Programs and Education (Senior Leadership Role) at the Elling Eide Center (ellingoeide.org). Ph.D. in Chinese Studies and proficiency in Classical Chinese required. (www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/...).
Yeah, literally, "[if/when] the realm is drowning, rescue it with the Word" is how I'd parse it. What's tricky is that 7-character lines are usually 4+3 rather than 3+4 as they are here.
Yeah 道 is "logos" in most translations of John 1. I had to memorize 太初有道，道與神同在，道就是神 in Calvin College's 4th-year Chinese class way back when.
In any case, the two lines are parallel, so I'd translate both with the same grammatical construction.
I’ve definitely translated this before somewhere. But I don’t remember.
Bobson Dugnutt is a seriously good baseball name
An 8-vol translation of Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō 正法眼藏 (13th cent.) has been published & is available on Jstor. A milestone in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Translators include Carl Bielefeldt, William M. Bodiford, T. Griffith Foulk, and the late Stanley Weinstein.
www.jstor.org/stable/jj.13...
Hot off the presses--and yes, this *is* open access! For those of you who want to know more about #milk and #medicine and #Chinesefood #TCM
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
There are bunch of different #scholarships/#fellowships going in Cambridge at the Needham Research Institute and its East Asian History of Science library #historyofscience #科技史
Here are details:
www.nri.cam.ac.uk/opportunitie...
Makes sense. Yeah, we usually only publish anything focused on the 20th century or later if it’s hardcore antiquarian
The repentance part of the text seems sincere, with some decent reflection on change in 心. And while his stated sins mostly reflect catalogs from that time, he does leave out drunkenness because he says he’s not a drinker by nature. So there’s some attempt to reflect reality