Streets Saturday: Worship – China Pics

“Do you believe in God?” The question, asked by a teenage girl with a sweet boy cut and a pink clip in her hair, mentally knocked me over in front of the crowd at the first English corner I attended in Purple Mountain Park. I knew what the answer was, but I didn’t know how to say it in front of people who clung to my every word, as if it were the gospel.

Put the words "religion" and "China" in a sentence together, and Western imaginations may go to indifference at best, to brutal repression at worst. Yet in grand historical perspective, China is a crucible of religious and philosophical thought and practice. Anthropologist and filmmaker Mayfair Yang says that the upheavals of the 20th century created an amnesia — in the West as in China itself — about this rich, pluralistic spiritual inheritance. She traces some of this story for us, and describes a subtle new revival of reverence and ritual.

An interesting post that ponders what might be missing in Chinese society to allow for 18 people to walk past the crushed body of Yueyue and do nothing.

Gays and lesbians across China were left pleasantly stunned last evening by an unexpected report from national broadcaster CCTV which not only slammed award-winning actress Lü Liping (吕丽萍) for stoking homophobia, but also assured members of the LGBT community of their place in society.