Chloë Starr

Professor of Asian Christianity and Theology

Council on East Asian Studies

Research Interests:

Asian Theology; Chinese Literature and Theology; Chinese Christian Scriptures

Professor Starr works in the borderland of theology and literature. She has just completed a series of three edited volumes setting out the field of Modern Chinese Theologies, published in 2023 and 2024. She recently published a long-awaited translation A Reader in Chinese Theology, bringing primary source texts to an English-reading audience. She is currently working on a study of Christ in Chinese fiction. Her last monograph, Chinese Theology (2016), was a study of Chinese theological texts and their ties to literary forms. Prof. Starr’s courses explore a range of approaches to East Asian theology, including theological survey, Chinese and Japanese Christian literatures, China Mission, and Asian American theologies. She taught previously at the universities of Durham, where she was Senior Tutor of St. John’s College, and Oxford, where she taught classical Chinese literature. Other works include Red-light Novels of the Late Qing (2007); a coedited volume, The Quest for Gentility in China (2007); and an edited volume, Reading Christian Scriptures in China (2008).

409 Prospect St., Room S209

Phone: 203-432-1424

chloe.starr@yale.edu

Website

Courses

Chinese and Japanese Christian Literature

REL 941

What effect did Christianity have on modern Chinese literature, and what sort of Christianity emerges from Chinese Christian literature? Is Endō Shusakū the only Japanese Christian writer (and does Martin Scorsese’s film do justice to Endō’s novel Silence)? This course tackles such questions by tracing the development of a Christian literature in China and Japan from late Imperial times to the beginning of the twenty-first century, with particular focus on the heyday (in China) of the 1920s and ’30s, and on the Japanese side, on Endō’s postwar novels. Using texts available in English, the course examines how Christian ideas and metaphors permeated the literary—and revolutionary—imagination in East Asia. Though rarely clearly in evidence, the influence of Christianity on Chinese literature came directly through the Bible and church education and indirectly through translated European and Western literature. The course tests the aesthetic visions and construction of the human being from texts set among Japanese samurai in Mexico to the revolutionary throes of modern China.

Spring

W 1:30 PM - 3:20 PM

The Chinese Theologians

REL 940

This course examines select readings from Chinese church and academic theologians (including Hong Kong writers and diaspora voices) to explore the nature of Chinese Christian thought. The readings cover late imperial Roman Catholic writers, early republican Protestant thinkers, high communist-era church theologians, and contemporary Sino-Christian academic theologians. Students read primary materials in English, supplemented by background studies and lecture material to help make sense of the theological constructions that emerge. The course encourages reflection on the challenges for Christian theology and life in a communist context, on the tensions between church and state in the production of theologies, and on the challenges that Chinese Christianity poses for global Christian thought.

Seminar

Spring

Th 1:30 PM - 3:20 PM