Review by Choice Review
In his Religious Policy and Practice in Communist China (CH, Nov'72), Sinologist MacInnis examined religious policy and practice in the People's Republic up through the Cultural Revolution. Religion in China Today provides an important collection of primary source documents on religious policy and practice since 1979. Part 1 presents the current official policy through translations of key documents, articles, and press reports; Part 2 examines the actual religious situation in China through firsthand interviews of laypersons and clergy, academic studies, statements by religious leaders, press reports, and journal articles. The text considers not only the mainline traditions of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, the Catholic, Protestant, and Russian Orthodox churches, and Judaism, but also Confucianism--once the devil of the cultural revolution--and popular religion as distinguished from superstition. Toward the end, the text examines religious surrogates in evidence: the socialist spiritual movement and Marxism as a faith. The final chapter on youth and religion indicates that the post-1979 revival of religion is not a phenomenon restricted to the elderly. The useful precis offered by the introductory passages to each set of documents and the lucid writing style make this volume an important reference work for every academic level and a must for any collection on Chinese religion. Though the glossary and the selected list of sources are brief, the index is helpful. The author insists that this volume provides only glimpses of the whole picture, but they are penetrating glimpses and, as such, serve to broaden the reader's understanding of the religious context of China after the Cultural Revolution. M. F. Nefsky University of Lethbridge
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
