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Protestant settlers in the Americas believed it was their duty to convert indigenous peoples to the true Gospel. Yet the task proved unexpectedly difficult. The effort revealed and challenged deep European assumptions about culture and the nature of Christianity itself. From Massachusetts to Chile, Protestant would-be missionaries took roads that were paved mostly, but not entirely, with good intentions. This lecture will show where they led.
China’s media provide a window into the Chinese mind, as the country asserts itself in the world as a great power. What do Chinese people think is the purpose of life? What matters most to them? In what do they believe? How do officials and journalists explain their responsibilities?
In the age of exploration, Catholic missionaries fanned out across the world, meeting with extraordinary success but also extraordinary opposition: nowhere more so than in Japan, where the fast-growing Catholic community was brutally suppressed in the early seventeenth century.
This lecture reports on the findings of "The Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China" (June 2019), which examined reports of state-sponsored murder for the harvesting and sale of organs.
The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 gave Chinese artists a government that had explicit policies for the arts, seeing them as an essential part of the creation of ‘new China’.
After the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, many artists and intellectuals in China saw the overthrow of ‘tradition’ as the means to rescue the nation from poverty and backwardness.
The 1920s in China saw both the political chaos of warlordism, but also a flowering of creativity which drew on the keen awareness by many of China’s potential as part of a global modernism.
In 2007, a team of doctors and scientists ascended to the roof of the world to understand more about how we adapt to high altitude - and why some of us adapt better than others. Uncovered is 15 years of research aiming to understand how humans adapt to low oxygen levels when critically ill.
The Zika virus originated in Africa and causes a febrile illness but was little known until it spread within Brazil in 2014. The lecture will also discuss the ‘nightmare scenario’ of the increased range of the mosquito as a result of climate change.