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WORK TITLE: A Call to China
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Bio indicates he’s a professor at UNC, Charlotte, but the university’s website says he was until 2008.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: three.
EDUCATION:University of Chicago, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, religious studies scholar, novelist, and educator. University of North Carolina Charlotte, professor of religion, 1971-2008, professor emeritus, 2008—.
AWARDS:Benjamin Franklin Award, silver winner in fiction, Independent Book Publishers Association.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Writer, educator, novelist, and scholar Jeffrey F. Meyer is a professor emeritus of religion at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. His career at the university spanned nearly four decades, from 1971 to 2008. He specializes in the religions of China and East Asia. He “taught Asian religions in the Religious Studies Department, with a focus on Buddhism and Daoism,” noted a writer on the website University of North Carolina Charlotte Exchange Online. Meyer holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Myths in Stone
Myers’s Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C. is an examination of the architecture of Washington, DC and how the impressively designed, sometimes breathtakingly constructed buildings in the American capital present a fundamentally religious experience to those who view them. The “stone temples of the city’s monumental core hold out visions of the nation’s purpose; the Republic’s founding documents rest under glass in the sacred space of the National Archives,” commented Amy Schwartz, writing in the Wilson Quarterly. Whether viewing these and other parts of the city as a visiting tourist, a business traveler, or a daily resident, the feeling imparted is one of religious appreciation and pilgrimage.
Meyer sees a connection between the buildings of Washington and the ancient structures of Babylon and other capitals from far in the past. These cities contained palaces, temples, ziggurats, pyramids, and other solidly made buildings that were made to last. They were intended, in the immediate presence, to convey a sense of the city’s wealth, its permanence, its impressiveness, and in Myers’s view, its religious sources. This type of architecture in the ancient world “symbolizes the larger cosmic order and proclaims a connection between the city and its heavenly sponsors,” Schwartz remarked. In the modern metropolis of Washington, DC, from the Washington Monument to the Jefferson Memorial, the structures, statues, and buildings accomplish a similar purpose.
A Publishers Weekly contributor called Myths in Stone a “detailed, well argued, impeccably researched study.”
A Call to China
A Call to China, Meyer’s first novel, follows the life stories of two daughters of an American missionary working in China before World War II. Circumstances dictate that the two girls will grow up without meeting each other. Elder daughter Victoria is kidnapped when she is a child, taken by a religious sect that intends to groom her as a future leader. Livia, the younger, is born after Victoria’s disappearance, but she endures some of the more grueling and dehumanizing effects of life for Asians during World War II. She spends years in an internment camp with her parents during the war, and afterward, grows up in an America that still mistrusts persons of Asian heritage.
Victoria, still living in China, encounters her own series of troubles. She has learned traditional healing methods and changed her name to Bu’er, but she has to find a way to survive the rise of Mao and the Cultural Revolution while living in a small and remote village. Livia later converts to Roman Catholicism, attends college, and becomes a Chinese religion scholar. She make a promise to her dying mother that she will return to China and find out what happened to Victoria. Her attempt to locate her sister is made all the more difficult by difficulties with government officials, distrust by locals, and the all-around problem of finding someone in a small village in China, where records and documentation may be sparse if existing at all. Throughout the book, “the text is full of rich details that enhance the book’s fully realized setting,” commented a Kirkus Reviews writer.
The Kirkus Reviews contributor called A Call to China an “engrossing fictional exploration of family, culture, and what it means to belong in both China and America.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of A Call to China.
Publishers Weekly, February 12, 2001, review of Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C.
Wilson Quarterly, spring, 2001, Amy Schwartz, review of Myths in Stone.
ONLINE
Ingram Elliott website, http://www.ingramelliott.com (August 9, 2018), biography of JeffreyMeyer.
University of North Carolina Charlotte, Department of Religious Studies website, http://www.religiousstudies.uncc.edu/ (August 9, 2018), biography of Jeffrey Meyer.
University of North Carolina Charlotte Exchange Online, http://exchange.uncc.edu/ (August 9, 2010), “Retired Professor’s Historical Fiction Book Wins National Award.”
Jeffrey Meyer
Jeffrey Meyer
Professor, Emeritus
jfmeyer@uncc.edu
Jeff Meyer (Ph.D., University of Chicago) taught at UNC Charlotte from 1971 until 2008. He is a specialist in the religions of China and East Asia.
Retired Professor’s Historical Fiction Book Wins National Award
A Call to China, a book written by UNC Charlotte retired religious studies professor Jeffrey Meyer, is a silver winner in the historical fiction category of the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Awards™.
The IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for excellence in book publishing, in its 30th year, is regarded as one of the highest national honors for small and independent publishers. Meyer’s book was published by the independent publisher IngramElliott, based in Huntersville.
A professor at UNC Charlotte for 35 years, Meyer taught Asian religions in the Religious Studies Department, with a focus on Buddhism and Daoism. He retired in 2008, and this is his first novel.
A Call to China is a coming of age story, about two sisters continents apart, who find and discover each other and themselves through spirituality and familial love.
A child of American missionaries disappears at a Beijing festival in 1940. Although devastated, the parents continue their dedicated missionary work in China. After the birth of a second child, Japanese occupiers force the family into a detention camp. Years later, the story continues as two sisters, raised in two different cultures, begin a search for identity and family against the background of revolutionary change in 20th century China and America.
book cover Call to China“Meyer convincingly creates multiple worlds – of pre-war China, missionaries, Japanese detention camps, postwar America, and reform-era China – that are rich and imaginative,” wrote Ian Johnson, Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter and author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, in a review. “Built around two strong women, the novel immerses us in Chinese and Christian religious communities, showcasing the author’s deep knowledge of China, religion and faith. Holding it all together is a riveting plot – a kidnapping whose effects span decades and continents.”
Meyer has long felt a connection to China, beginning as a young boy when he was reading Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. His interest continued as a scholar, as he earned his doctoral degree at The University of Chicago and pursued a career devoted to researching and teaching about the Chinese culture. He and his wife also adopted a daughter from China.
This year’s indie book award program recognized excellence in books published during calendar year 2017. From close to 1,500 entries, one gold winner and one silver winner were named in each of 54 categories. Over 150 librarians, booksellers, and design and editorial experts – most of whom have decades of book industry experience – judge the books submitted to the program.
Founded in 1983 to support independent publishers nationwide and boasting over 3,000 members, the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) leads and serves the independent publishing community through advocacy, education, and tools for success.
About the Author
Jeffrey Meyer
Jeffrey Meyer has always felt a connection to China. He felt his “call to China” as a young boy, after reading Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. He would go on to devote his life and career to learning the Chinese culture.
A professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for thirty-five years, Jeffrey taught Asian religions in the Religious Studies department, with a focus on Buddhism and Daoism. He is married with three grown children, currently living in Davidson, North Carolina. A Call to China is his first novel.
Meyer, Jeffrey: A CALL TO CHINA
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
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Meyer, Jeffrey A CALL TO CHINA IngramElliott Publishing (Indie Fiction) $27.99 8, 1 ISBN: 978-0-9966864-7-1
Two sisters grow up without meeting and follow different but intersecting paths in 20th-century China and the United States.
In this novel, Meyer (Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C., 2001) traces the temporal and spiritual journeys of the two daughters of an American missionary stationed in China before World War II. Victoria, the older one, is kidnapped as a child by a religious sect that sees her as its future leader. Livia, born after Victoria's disappearance, endures an internment camp with her parents during the war, then grows up in midcentury America. The narrative moves back and forth between the two sisters as Victoria, now known as Bu'er, learns traditional healing and survives Mao's ascendancy and the Cultural Revolution in an out-of-the-way village, gradually coming to terms with her role in the religious community. Meanwhile, Livia converts to Roman Catholicism, experiences the 1960s as a college student, pursues a Ph.D., and becomes a scholar of Chinese religion. As relations between China and the United States are restored in the 1970s and '80s, Livia is able to return to her country of birth and promises her dying mother she will find out what happened to Victoria. The plot, sedate and expansive for most of the book, takes a Robert Ludlum-esque turn as Livia faces challenges from suspicious locals and government officials in her search for Victoria, but it returns to a more contemplative pace in the final chapters. Meyer is clearly knowledgeable about Chinese history and culture (an author's note explains his personal connections to the country), and the text is full of rich details that enhance the book's fully realized setting. Memorable secondary characters play key roles in both storylines, each distinctly drawn and thoroughly developed. The occasionally repetitive narrative (for instance, there are multiple conversations about Livia becoming a department chair at a college) could have been more tightly edited. But the tale avoids getting bogged down in philosophical discussions and maintains its momentum as the sisters undergo their separate religious evolutions.
An engrossing fictional exploration of family, culture, and what it means to belong in both China and America.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Meyer, Jeffrey: A CALL TO CHINA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959687/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=38b39390. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959687
MYTHS IN STONE: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C.
AMY SCHWARTZ
MYTHS IN STONE: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C. By Jeffrey F. Meyer. Univ. of California Press. 343 pp. $35
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MYTHS IN STONE: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C. By Jeffrey F. Meyer. Univ. of California Press. 343 pp. $35
If you follow the tourists around Washington, D.C., it’s hard to miss the element of pilgrimage. Visitors come to see vistas that reaffirm the meaning of American history. The stone temples of the city’s monumental core hold out visions of the nation’s purpose; the Republic’s founding documents rest under glass in the sacred space of the National Archives. The experience of viewing these sites, Meyer argues, is fundamentally religious. He quotes historian Daniel Boorstin: "Architecture can and does play the role of ritual."
Meyer, a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, never quite explains what makes something a religious experience rather than a ritual or symbolic one, and the failure leaves conceptual gaps in this otherwise intriguing book. But his definition of religion is evidently capacious. He traces some of Washington’s "religious" aspects back to Babylon and other ancient capitals: radiating avenues, orientation of the city’s main axes to the four points of the compass, "central monumental architecture like temples, palaces, pyramids, ziggurats, and raised altars," and "processional boulevards connecting these places of power." Such architecture, Meyer says, symbolizes the larger cosmic order and proclaims a connection between the city and its heavenly sponsors.
That ancient religious impulse, in Meyer’s view, emanates from the wordless, enigmatic Washington Monument and echoes the early settlers’ belief that they were creating a new Jerusalem firmly under the protection of Providence. It resonates in the Framers’ "missionary" certainty that their great experiment would bring a new birth of freedom to mankind, a conviction expressed through what Meyer calls the "axis of Enlightenment" running from the White House to the Jefferson Memorial. Where the Jefferson edifice is light, open, and hopeful, the more somber Lincoln Memorial completes the task of "baptizing the Founders’ terms into the religious discourse of American Christians, with Lincoln assuming the aura of a Christlike figure who saved the Union by taking its sufferings on himself."
The argument breaks down somewhat when Meyer turns to the Smithsonian Institution and the tree-lined National Mall. A quick tour of recent controversies, such as the fiasco over an Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian, is meant to show how these venues have become a locus for communal reevaluation of the American experience. But such squabbles hardly seem to fall under the rubric of religion, even American civic religion. Nor does Meyer’s closing survey—fascinating though it is—of the allegorical artworks that decorate the Capitol itself, including now-objectionable depictions of the white man’s conquest of the Native Americans.
The tussle over changing cultural meanings, religious or otherwise, is an important pitched battles over the messages conveyed by part of the capital’s life. This book makes clear statues, museums, and memorials. that ours is not the first generation to fight.
—Amy Schwartz
Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C.
Jeffrey F. Meyer, Author University of California Press $39.95 (354p) ISBN 978-0-520-21481-1
While Washington, D.C., is clearly the axis mundi of political power, religion professor Jeffrey F. Meyer believes it is also a national symbol of America's religious consciousness. In Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C., Meyer takes readers on a tour of the nation's capital, discussing the sacred aspects of sites such as the Capitol Building, the Washington Memorial, the White House and Arlington Cemetery. This is a detailed, well argued, impeccably researched study that will be of interest to both the spiritual traveler and the professional historian.