Bøger af Leopold Leeb

This book introduces the history of cultural exchanges between East Asia and the West through comparative biographical sketches of sixty personalities from China and Japan.

In the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai was not only the largest, richest, and most modern city of China, the site of churches and schools, the residence of politicians and powerful merchants, it was also the home of innumerable beggars and street children. In the heart of this busy metropolis the young and ambitious Catholic Joseph Lu Bohong (also known as Loh Pahong, 1875-1937) had become rich by managing one of the first electric power stations and a tramway line. What made him so special was that he felt compassion with the lot of the poor in Shanghai and actively helped them. He used his organization talents and his financial resources to build a large hospice for homeless people, where, with the help of Catholic nurses, he cared for several thousand orphans, homeless, sick or old people. He founded a hospital to treat infectuous diseases, and later he built China's first large institute for mental diseases. He made regular visits in hospitals to console the moribund, and he even hurried to prisons to baptize criminals hours before their execution, since he wanted to save their souls. Based on Chinese and western sources and on recent interviews with the grandson of Lu Bohong, this book tells the amazing and inspiring story of the life of Joseph Lu Bohong, a Catholic layman of international reputation who was killed in a mysterious assassination in 1937. Only after eighty years the enigma of "Who killed Lu Bohong" could finally be solved.

This comparative study of the history of the Catholic Church in China and Vietnam from the seventeenth to the twentieth century opens up new perspectives for the understanding of the presence of Christianity in Asia. The author narrates the biographies of a number of outstanding missionaries and Christians from China and Vietnam and tries to understand them in their respective historical backgrounds by applying the principle of mutual illumination: the experience of China may help to understand the Vietnamese reality and vice versa. In this way some interesting similarities between European missionaries and local Christians are revealed. At the same time the parallel biographies from China and Vietnam throw a light on the peculiar cultural and political contexts of Christianity in the two nations. The book, based on recent research in several languages, is a pioneering attempt at writing comparative ecclesiastical history in Asia and offers an insightful synopsis, occasionally even including observations on Japan and Korea. The study presents new questions and fields for further research, including native church leadership, Christian architecture, arts, and literature, and common theological vocabularies. The work discloses hitherto unnoticed spiritual links between China and Vietnam.