When the Japanese invaded Joseon at the end of the sixteenth century, a Spanish Jesuit priest, Gregorio de Céspedes, S.J. , stayed in the Japanese fortress in Ungcheon with Japanese soldiers. While Céspedes is celebrated as the first European who allegedly came with an evangelical vision of proselytizing the native Koreans, previous scholarship has inadequately acknowledged Céspedes’ role without consideration of his concrete actions in the Japanese fortress and of the broader context of (...) class='Hi'>sixteenth–century Spanish colonial expansion. An examination of the Jesuit mission to sixteenth-century Japan, the role of the Spanish chaplains and their activities in foreign expeditions, and Céspedes’ activities in Joseon indicate that Céspedes was not a missionary sent to Korea, but rather an active chaplain who played a role in the larger development of church and state collaboration under Spanish colonialism. (shrink)

abstract: The first Christian missionaries arrived in Japan in the middle of the sixteenth century. They missionized quite a number of Japanese people but also angered many through their disrespectful behavior and destruction of temples and shrines. Less than 100 years later, Japan closed its borders, persecuted Christians, and banned Christianity in total. The reasons for this drastic step weren't solely political but also theological. Theological arguments concerning theism, eschatology, ethics, and theology of religion are found in official (...) edicts, in "disputes" between Christian missionaries and Buddhist scholars, as well as in theological treatise. One of the reoccurring arguments against Christianity includes the description of the arrogant behavior of the missionaries. According to the documents, they displayed an attitude of knowing everything concerning the world next to the ignorant Buddhists. This exclusivist mindset wasn't compatible with the order of Japan and the three teachings. In the eyes of the authorities, this doctrine secured peace and ensured domestic stability. Especially the Japanese and former Christian Fabian Fucan, as well as the Buddhist monk Suzuki Shōsan, adduce various Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist teachings against the charge of ignorance. Conversely, Fucan's writing, as well as the edicts, records of religious "disputes," and other treatises, include the accusation that Christianity does not contain any new doctrine advancing the local one. Moreover, it is stated that Christian salvation exclusivism suggests a powerless God, and the missionaries were described as hypocrites and liars, as they did not keep their commandments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist LandTerry C. MuckKingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land. By Alan Strathern. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 304 pp.Buddhist-Christian relationships in Southeast Asian countries have a history that goes back to colonizations of the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French beginning in the sixteenth century. By studying (...) the story of those early occupations, one can predict with some accuracy the nature of the relationships between Buddhists and Christians today.In Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka, Alan Strathern, research fellow in history at Clare Hall, Cambridge, unearths a piece of the story that helps us understand the antipathy that exists today between Buddhists and Christians in Sri Lanka. As the title indicates, it is a book with a small thesis, limited geographical scope, and of short temporal duration. That is, it is a scholarly book that examines why a Christian monarchy was never established in sixteenth century coastal Sri Lanka during the one hundred years of colonial presence and rule of the maritime regions (ca. 1600–1658) by Roman Catholic Portugal.Strathern breaks new ground by delving into letters written by Portuguese churchmen, which have not previously been used in histories of this period. He ignores neither traditional Buddhist sources (the vaṃsa tradition in Sri Lanka) nor traditional Christian sources (principally Portuguese Jesuit Fernao de Queiros’s The Temporal and [End Page 221] Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon). And he is candid about his debt to the “presiding scholar” of the Portuguese period in Sri Lanka, C.R. de Silva, and also the “other expert in the field,” Jorge Manuel Flores. But the heretofore unused Portuguese letters provide the other side of the conversation that helps explain much.Strathern’s broader periodization begins with the Portuguese’s first incursions into Sri Lanka in 1505 and ends with the collapse of the Portuguese rule in the coastal regions to the Dutch in 1658. But his real focus is on the reign of the most important Sri Lankan monarch during this period, King Bhuvanekabāhu VII, who reigned from 1521 to 1551. It was King Bhuvanekabāhu’s policies regarding the Portuguese and particularly his welcoming of Christian missionaries that have created such controversy among historians of this period, both Sinhalese and Portuguese (and other Western historians). For some, Bhuvanekabāhu was weak and vacillating, for others strong and consistent. For some Bhuvanekabāhu was a captive, powerless vassal, for others a ruler of agency and foresight, making decisions that were the very best he could do given the overwhelming might of the Portuguese navy.Strathern’s conclusion, finely argued and carefully nuanced, is that Bhuvanekabāhu should be given more credit that he is usually given for wise kingship. But the pointed question that Strathern decides is key to the role Bhuvanekabāhu plays is his decision not to convert to Christianity, at an important period in Southeast Asian history when “conversion” to Christianity had become more than a religious decision—it had become a political and economic strategy of some weight, a decision that many other rulers of this period in south India and elsewhere were making as a matter of expedience. Why, asks Strathern, did Bhuvanekabāhu not make the same decision?The answer comes in three explorations that form the three parts of the book. The first is an exploration of the question of kingship in South and Southeast Asia during this period, specifically the role that kings conquered by colonial powers played. Strathern calls this the Temporal Question. The second is an exploration of what happened to these political dynamics when Christian missionaries are thrown in the mix. Strathern calls this the Spiritual Question. Third is an exploration of the overall effect on these two factors on the colonial powers, indigenous nationhoods, and the two religious institutions, Buddhism and Christianity.The TemporalThe sixteenth century in Sri Lanka was a time of unavoidable political alliances. The irresistible power of the colonizing power in Sri Lanka, beginning with Portuguese in 1505, meant that one could either fight to the death... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies:Report on the 39th Annual Meeting August 18–19, 2021Kunihiko TerasawaThe 2021 annual conference of the Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held online by Zoom. Five presentations were given on the theme of "Religion and Literature."August 18 (Three Presentations)First, President of the Japan-SBCS and professor emeritus at Sophia University, Yutaka Tanaka, presented "Hosokawa Garasha (Gracia)," which was about a Kirishitan (Christian) woman martyr in (...) the sixteenth century (1563–1600 ce) in Japan. Garasha was a wife of the feudal lord Hosokawa in Kyushu. The enemy attacked Garasha's castle. Instead of being killed by enemies, for the sake of honor, she chose to be killed by ritual suicide by her own vassals. Garasha's servants wanted to die with her according to tradition, but she let them run away. The servants testified about her death to Jesuit missionaries. According to the missionaries, Garasha chose to be killed by her vassals because it was honorable as the wife of Lord Hosokawa. If she would have chosen to run away, her husband would have become anti-Christian, persecuting missionaries, and believers. In this way, she became a martyr. According to missionaries, Garasha always loved reading the Imitatio Christi longing for the experience of Christ's cross.Tanaka explained the story of Garasha was spread in the sixteenth–seventeenth-century Europe through Jesuit missionaries. This story was composed to become an opera of Mulier Fortis (a brave lady) and played at the palace of Vienna in 1698.Second, Kunihiko Terasawa, an associate professor at Wartburg College, presented about his research in South Korea and Hong Kong during his sabbatical in 2019–2020. Terasawa's research project was titled "Interreligious/Transnational Solidarity of Religion as Resistance to Ultranationalist Populism in East Asia and Pacific Rim." In South Korea, he was a visiting professor at Sogang University, a Jesuit college, focused on how reconciliation could be possible between Korea and Japan through Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Terasawa visited churches, temples, Christian/Buddhist universities, and Seoul National University for discussions with youth and scholars, and presented four times during his time. He also interviewed comfort women and visited the Sodemon prison that the Japanese' occupation government built. Terasawa was [End Page 389] eventually interviewed by a national daily newspaper for their piece, titled, "The Improvement of Korea-Japan Relationship through Repentance and Forgiveness."Terasawa was also a visiting professor at Hang Seng University of Hong Kong and taught a course on "Asian Religions and Society." Terasawa interviewed students, scholars, and religious leaders, and found that many Christians students are involved in democratic movements. However, it has not been easy to create solidarity between Christianity and Buddhism for democratic movements. Hong Kong Buddhists have had resentment toward Christianity due to the British Hong Kong government's leniency toward Christianity. The Buddhists, therefore, are more inclined to support the current Hong Kong government backed by the Chinese Communist government. The Buddhists appear to be politically indifferent, focusing on inner mindfulness or meditations. Thus, Hong Kong students and professors are focused less on past resentments and more on the future, and thus are vital in creating solidarity among Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims for democracy and human rights.Third, Yoshio Tsuruoka, a professor emeritus at Tokyo University, presented "How to read the poems of St. John the Cross with reference to the 'language' philosophy of Shizuteru Ueda." Ueda was a professor at Kyo to University, specializing in the philosophies of Nishida Kitaro and Meister Eckhart. Tsuruoka explained St. John the Cross'sjourney, most notably, how he became a mystic in his relation to Teresa de Ávila and ended up writing poems during his confinement time. His poems are "songs of love,""dark night," and "fire of love," and symbolize the romantic relationship between lover and loved without particular nouns. This love relationship of "I"–"Thou" implies his love relationship with God. Tsuruoka explored the love language of "I"–"Thou" of John the Cross which indicates the essence of language. Language is not just a written word or descriptive one, but an utterance from a human subject of person to the "other" person in relationship. That is why... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 257-259 [Access article in PDF] Jesus through Buddhist Eyes: 3rd Conference of European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies, Archabbey St. Ottilien, Germany, February 26-March 1, 1999 John D'Arcy MayIrish School of Ecumenics, DublinThis ambitious conference, attended by well over 100 participants including a number of practitioners of Buddhist meditation from southern Germany and Austria, has put the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies firmly on its feet. (...) Intended mainly for academics working in the field and held entirely in English, the conference, on "Buddhist Perceptions of Jesus," traced various paths from the polemics which characterized relations between Buddhists and Christians well into the century now ending to the remarkable progress made by Buddhist-Christian dialogue in recent decades. The Archabbey of St. Ottilien has itself been the scene of intermonastic exchanges between the Benedictine monks and their Japanese Zen counterparts.The architecture of the conference brought out clearly the distance that has been traveled. Iso Kern (Berne) examined the missionary methodology of the Jesuits in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. He showed how they preferred to rely on arguments from reason rather than affront the Chinese with the full implications of Christian revelation, treading a thin line between absorption into harmony with Chinese religion as "a special type of Buddhism" and controversy about the uniqueness of Jesus and his redemptive death on the cross. The Christian idea of a Creator who redeems a sinful world by the substitutionary sacrifice of his own Son was so repugnant to Confucian sensibility that the Jesuits chose a different route, though Professor Kern defended them against Pascal's accusation that they 'hid' the scandal of the cross. Heinz Murmel (Leipzig, in a paper read in his absence) sketched the sterile polemics which characterized early Buddhist-Christian encounters in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, while Frank Usarski (São Paulo) analyzed the equally bitter exchanges between early German converts to Buddhism and their Christian opponents. We were to find not only that these controversies are still remembered in Southeast Asia, but that the obstacles to understanding encountered by the Jesuits in China and Japan still cause problems in Buddhist-Christian relations today. [End Page 257]Of fundamental importance to the development of the conference was a difficult paper by Shizuteru Ueda (Kyoto) on "Jesus in Contemporary Japanese Zen." Starting with his teacher Nishitani's presentation on "Nietzsche and Eckhart" to Heidegger's seminar in 1938, Professor Ueda set out to show how both European nihilism and Christian absolutism can be overcome by Nishitani's understanding of s´unyata: "The last ground of 'I am‚' is without ground and groundless." S´unyata is itself subject to s´unyata: nihilism can only be surmounted through nihilism itself. This dynamic relationship between Into-Nothingness and Out-of-Nothingness is Zen's point of access to Paul's characterization of Christian life-out-of death: "I live no more, Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). Confronted by the question "Who said this?" as Nishitani confronted his Christian friend Muto, the Christian is challenged to ask whether he or she can actually say it, thereby bearing true witness. Ueda's problem is not with this witness, but with the Christian claim that Jesus is unique, for God is not only infinite Person but infinite Openness (basho).Some of these themes were echoed by two speakers who based themselves on experience rather than philosophy: Karl Schmied, a lay associate of Thich Nhat Hanh, and Than Santikharo Bhikkhu, an American monk at Suan Mokkh and Buddhadasa's translator in the last eight years of his life. Without repudiating his Catholic roots, Schmied said that he had simply found more joy in Buddhism. If Jesus is Son of Man and Son of God non-dualistically, could not the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity be one of non-duality, despite obvious differences (rebirth/ historical uniqueness; no-self/person; emptiness/being). Cannot Jesus be seen as a universal Bodhisattva whose 'center,' is everywhere rather than as God's 'only' son?Santikharo Bhikkhu, who still visits... (shrink)

First Words, Last Words charts an intense "pamphlet war" that took place in sixteenth-century South India. The book explores this controversy as a case study in the dynamics of innovation in early modern India, a time of great intellectual innovation. This debate took place within the traditional discourses of Vedic Hermeneutics, or Mīmāṃsā, and its increasingly influential sibling discipline of Vedānta, and its proponents among the leading intellectuals and public figures of the period. At the heart of this dispute (...) lies the role of sequence in the cognitive processing of textual information, especially of a scriptural nature. Vyāsatīrtha and his grand-pupil Vijayīndratīrtha, writers belonging to the camp of Dualist Vedānta, purported to uphold the radical view of their founding father, Madhva, who believed, against a long tradition of Mīmāṃsā interpreters, that the closing portion of a scriptural passage should govern the interpretation of its opening. By contrast, the Nondualist Appayya Dikshita ostensibly defended this tradition's preference for the opening. But, as the book shows, the debaters gradually converged on a profoundly novel hermeneutic-cognitive theory in which sequence played little role, if any. In fact, they knowingly broke new ground, and only postured as traditionalists. First Words, Last Words explores the nature of theoretical innovation in this debate and sets it against the background of comparative examples from other major scriptural interpretive traditions. The book briefly surveys the use of sequence in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutics and also seeks out parallel cases of covert innovation in these traditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam:Benjamin Lee Wren (1931–2006)Peter A. HuffAlmost a year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated his beloved New Orleans, Benjamin Wren, longtime member of the history department at Loyola University–New Orleans, died on July 20, 2006. Wren joined the Loyola faculty in 1970 and taught popular courses in Chinese history, Japanese history, and world history. He is best remembered for his unprecedented courses in Zen and the unique (...) campus zendo where he taught them. His courses integrated meditation practice, philosophical reflection, historical investigation, and a bit of group therapy into what many students have described as life-changing experiences.Wren was the son of an American Marine and a Hong Kong native who met in Tientsin, China. Growing up in the American South during the Great Depression and World War II, he encountered firsthand the racism and xenophobia that defined the Bible Belt as a distinct cultural region in the first half of the twentieth century. He entered the Society of Jesus when he was seventeen years of age and earned degrees from Spring Hill College, Saint Louis University, and the University of Arizona. Nearly fifty years later, he left the Jesuits and married Patricia Wren.Wren's professional life did not follow the path of the conventional academic career. For several years he taught in Jesuit high schools. After discovering a book on the Japanese art of flower arranging in a Texas public library, he pursued graduate studies in Asian religion and history. Like many of his generation, he was influenced by Jean Dechanet's Christian Yoga and Dom Aelred Graham's Zen Catholicism. He studied Zen with Yamada Roshi in Kamakura and ikebana with Sofu Teshigahara of the Sogetsu School in Tokyo. He initiated his Zen courses at Loyola partially in response to student unrest in the wake of the Kent State massacre.Wren published very little and did not easily negotiate the tenure process. His Zen among the Magnolias (1999) represents more personal testimony than scholarly argument. He did, however, have the extraordinary ability to stretch his students' imaginations and aspirations beyond the formal limitations of higher education and professional expectations. I saw this dimension of his [End Page 137] work very clearly when he served as the keynote speaker for Centenary College's 2004 one-day conference on "The Dharma in Dixie," a program featuring leaders and practitioners from Louisiana's Hindu and Buddhist communities. Wren's animated talk, fusing a whirlwind tour of Chinese history with a riveting critique of contemporary American culture, was by all accounts the highlight of the event.In Zen among the Magnolias, Wren wrote, "The two symbols used to write the word Zen are the symbols for God and warfare. For us who come out of a Judaic/ Christian background, we have the tradition of Jacob fighting with God and emerging from the fight with a new name, Israel (He who has fought with God)" (p. 7). By the time he spoke at my institution, Wren was already engaged in his final battle with cancer. During the chaos of Hurricane Katrina, we lost track of each other. Then I heard of the memorial service to be held in his honor at an Episcopal church in a New Orleans suburb."Zen Ben" Wren's brand of personal passion and intellectual integrity is a rare commodity in today's corporate academy. "The best teachers," he said, "never lose their student IDs, and they also bring out the master in their respective students" (p. 16). Loyola's zendo once housed an unforgettable teacher. [End Page 138]Peter A. HuffCentenary College of LouisianaCopyright © 2007 The University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

This article draws upon the fragmentary evidence in various Japanese sources, mostly from the Heian, Kamakura, and Muromachi periods, to examine the extent and nature of imports of books from Korea to Japan before Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea in the 1590s. Some of the evidence comes from historical chronicles, but the Ishinpō, a voluminous compendium of medicine, also refers to some Korean texts, and the Annals of the Chosŏn Dynasty contain further information, mostly but not only relating to (...) class='Hi'>Japanese requests for copies of the Korean printed Buddhist canon. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, The Eastern Buddhist journal pioneered the presentation of Buddhism to the west and encouraged the west's engagement in interpretation. This interactive process increased dramatically in the post-war period, when dialogue between Buddhist and Christian thought began to take off in earnest. These debates and dialogues brought in voices with a Zen orientation, influenced in part by the philosophical Buddhism of the Kyoto School. Also to be heard however were contributions from the Pure Land and the (...) Shin Buddhist traditions, which also have a strong tradition in the city. The book brings together a wide range of authors who have significantly influenced subsequent Buddhist-Christian dialogue and the interaction between east and west. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Escalation to Academic Extremes?Revisiting Academic Rivalry in the Möhler/Baur DebateGrant Kaplan (bio)INTRODUCTION: THEOLOGY AS THE SITE OF CONFLICTOne way to understand the history of Christian theology is as a history of rivalries. In the Letter to the Galatians, Paul and Peter seem like rivals when Paul recounts "opposing Peter to his face" (Gal. 2:11). The key theological discoveries in the fourth and fifth century are mostly borne of rivalry: (...) Eunomius versus the Cappadocians, and Pelagius versus Augustine. The Middle Ages contain the Eucharistic controversies between Pascasius and Ratramnus, and later controversies about the nature of authority in the theology between Abelard and Lombard. By the sixteenth century, not only the history of theology but the history of the Western churches seems to be intertwined with rivalry, with the Protestant Reformation being the most obvious example. One could also tell the history of religious orders as a history of rivalries between, among others, Franciscans and Dominicans, and later Jesuits. The teachings on justification arose from rivalries, and most of modern Catholic ecclesiology arose from Bellarmine's disputatious interactions with leading Lutherans like Flacius [End Page 163] and Chemnitz. In the past century, much of the theological terrain seems to be shaped by disputes between figures who had once been aligned: Barth and Brunner, Balthasar and Rahner, Cone and Jones.In retrospect, the nineteenth century seemed primed for theological rivalry. Due to social, political, and institutional factors, the nineteenth century was profoundly destabilizing for theology, particularly in Germany, where political realignment threatened to unsettle whatever truce had emerged after the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. A number of factors contributed to this climate; perhaps foremost among them was the rapid expansion of academic journals. Without being in the same room, scholars could argue and respond to one another in what must have felt like "real time." Journals, to put it crudely, were the online comment section of their day, and they provided a new medium for theological dispute. Although public debate still figured prominently in the sixteenth century, even as the printing press was making it less central to theological argument, in the nineteenth century, one could escalate debate through asynchronous modes of communication.Both political destabilization and technological innovation made possible a range of intraconfessional disputes: among both Protestants—between mediating and confessing, Kantian and Hegelian, authoritarian, and scientific theologies—and Catholics—between scholastic and modern, German and Roman, Gallican and ultramontanist theologies. These circumstances also occasioned a redoubling of confessional identity. Olaf Blaschke has described the nineteenth century as a "second confessional age."1 By this he means that the nineteenth century, on the scale of confessional identity, looked more like the sixteenth century than the eighteenth did; instead of manifesting an increase in secularizing and nationalizing forces that downplayed religious identities, the nineteenth, according to a variety of measures, witnessed an upsurge in confessional identity.2 This upsurge affected Württemberg, the primarily Protestant territory in the southwestern part of Germany, where Tübingen was located. The newly constituted Württemberg combined a number of tiny, mono-confessional states into a larger, multi-confessional state as part of the reconfigurations brought about by Napoleon. Practically, this meant a loss in political autonomy for Catholic areas within Württemberg.According to one account, the confessional conflicts that memorably marked the 1870s (the Kulturkampf) and also the 1830s and 1840s (the Cologne Troubles and the Kniebeugungsstreiten) were already on the increase in the 1810s in Württemberg, in part due to the massive anniversary celebrations (Wartburgfeier) of the Reformation in 1817.3 This was the same year that the government relocated the newly established Catholic theological faculty from Ellwangen [End Page 164] to Tübingen, a long-time Protestant stronghold with a reputable theological faculty.The Catholic theologians in Tübingen were eager to engage critically with the leading theological issues of the day, resisting the urge to hide behind confessional barriers or pious pretenses. This decision led to a variety of conflicts that could be called rivalrous, and that fall into three categories: The first was within the Catholic faculty itself, as exemplified in the debate over celibacy. Their journal... (shrink)

In this book, Sarah Rolfe Prodan examines the spiritual poetry of Michelangelo in light of three contexts: the Catholic Reformation movement, Renaissance Augustinianism, and the tradition of Italian religious devotion. Prodan combines a literary, historical, and biographical approach to analyze the mystical constructs and conceits in Michelangelo's poems, thereby deepening our understanding of the artist's spiritual life in the context of Catholic Reform in the mid-sixteenth century. Prodan also demonstrates how Michelangelo's poetry is part of an Augustinian tradition that (...) emphasizes mystical and moral evolution of the self. Examining such elements of early modern devotion as prayer, lauda singing, and the contemplation of religious images, Prodan provides a unique perspective on the subtleties of Michelangelo's approach to life and to art. Throughout, Prodan argues that Michelangelo's art can be more deeply understood when considered together with his poetry, which points to a spirituality that deeply informed all of his production. (shrink)

Hangang Jeong Gu can be considered a representative Yeongnam regions’s scholar of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was a scholar who followed in the footsteps of both Emperor Lee Hwang and Jo Sik, and developed his studies especially in the fields of psychology and art. He was a scholar who inherited from the scholastic mantle of Lee Hwang and Jo Sik, and developed his own scholarship, especially focusing on study of mind and study of ritual. He (...) was active mainly in the Yeongnam region centered on Seongju and Daegu. The Yeongnam region was located on the road to the Japanese invasion during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 and directly suffered the damage. For this reason, after the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, those who led the righteous army activities in the Yeongnam region led the academic world, and among them, there were many figures of the Hangang School, including Jeong Gu. Studies on Jeong Gu have been accumulated for about 40 years, starting in 1985, and are being studied in various fields such as literature, history, and philosophy. And as the research on Jeong Gu progressed, the Hangang School, which inherited the academic flow of Jeong Gu, was gradually studied. In this paper, research on the Hangang School is largely divided into four categories: the external appearance and status of the Hangang School, the aspect of academic transmission of Jeong Gu, the growth and expansion of the Hangang School, and the social practice of the Hangang School. First of all, the denotation and status of the Hangang School were examined through Hoiyeongeupmunjehyeonrok and Bongsanyokhangrok. Hoiyeongeupmunjehyeonrok is Jeong Gu’s literary record, which examines the overall scale and extension of the Hangang School, and through Bongsanyokhangrok, Jeong Gu’s academic influence at the time, as well as the bonds and solidarity within the school can be confirmed. And the aspect of Jeong Gu’s academic transmission was examined through Hangangeonhaeongrok, a collection of Jeong Gu’s words and actions. Through this, it is possible to confirm Jeong Gu’s academic thoughts passed down to the Hangang School. In addition, the growth and expansion of the Hangang School can be confirmed through the process in which a large number of second-generation and third-generation Confucian scholars in the Daegu region who were active at the time were absorbed into the Hangang School as Jeong Gu moved his lecture center from Seongju to Daegu and Chilgok. In addition, as one of the aspects of social practice of the Hangang School, it can be confirmed through the development of righteous armies activities during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592. Lastly, it contains contents about some tasks in the study of the Hangang School in the future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Dialogue:Moving ForwardThomas Cattoi (bio) and Carol S. Anderson (bio)The San Francisco Bay Area is an interesting location in which to ponder Buddhist-Christian relations. The website UrbanDharma.org lists more than a hundred institutions affiliated with Buddhist organizations—a density higher than in the Beijing metropolitan area. Some of these centers have a clearly ethnic and denominational character, serving a predominantly immigrant population. Some, like many of the Tibetan organizations, function (...) as cultural centers but also attract a considerable Western clientele. Others, like the San Francisco Zen Center or Spirit Rock in Marin County, belong to the first wave of historical Buddhist centers established in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. A few more are trying to establish new forms of enculturated Buddhist practice that are more suited to Western sensitivities and are only loosely affiliated with the cultures of traditional Buddhist societies. At the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, alongside schools training Jesuit priests, Dominican friars, and Protestant ministers of various denominations, the Institute of Buddhist Studies prepares students from different walks of life to work as Buddhist chaplains in hospitals and educational institutions. Buddhism, in its various forms and manifestations, is no longer an exotic import from a little known “elsewhere,” but is part and parcel of the local spiritual landscape.For students and scholars practicing in such a diverse environment, it is perhaps difficult to imagine that for the greatest part of its history, most of Christendom was largely unaware of the very existence of the Buddhist tradition. While Clement of Alexandria and Jerome do mention Buddhism, and references to its practice can be found in the writings of medieval travelers such as Marco Polo, most European Christians lived in a world where the role of the religious “other” was played by Judaism and Islam. It was only in the early modern era, with the beginning of the European colonization of Asia, that non-Abrahamic religious traditions gradually entered the intellectual horizon of Western intellectuals and scholars. Around the year 1740, a French Jesuit named Jean-François Pons (1688–1752), otherwise remembered as a pioneer of Sanskrit studies in the West, came to the startling realization that many of the religious practices that missionaries and travelers had come across in regions as far apart as China, Japan, Nepal, and Mongolia were actually all parts of the same religious tradition. In his correspondence with his fellow Jesuits in France, he coined the [End Page vii] term Bauddhamatham—teaching of the Buddha—to refer to what would eventually be known as Buddhism. In the early years of the nineteenth century, many Sanskrit and Tibetan texts started to be catalogued and translated into the major European languages, bringing about the first encounter between Europe’s intellectual elites and this utterly foreign religious tradition.The nineteenth century also saw the beginning of a more existential engagement with the Buddhism tradition, albeit one that was limited to intellectual elites who were highly critical of institutional Christianity. In his work The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer found in Buddhism many echoes of his own philosophical insights. Many of the members of the Pāli Text Society, established in London in 1871, had rejected Christianity and thought they would find in Buddhism a moral framework in a society where the normativity of the Christian tradition had already started to be questioned. At the same time, we also see the beginning of the first comparative studies, where Buddhism and Christianity are compared from a speculative and doctrinal perspective. In 1880, Ernest de Bunsen claimed that if one made an exception for the crucifixion, many of the fundamental moral teachings of Buddhism and Christianity were virtually identical. This was just the beginning of a slew of similar studies.While the Christian churches were initially uninterested or outright skeptical about engaging in dialogue with non-Christian religious traditions, this attitude started to shift in the decades following the Second World War. The Second Vatican Council, for instance, marked an important shift in the Catholic Church’s attitude toward other religions. Before the 1960s, Catholic theology departments did not offer courses on other religious traditions or on interreligious dialogue... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Original Dwelling Place: Zen EssaysRobert E. GossOriginal Dwelling Place: Zen Essays. By Robert Aitken. Upland, California: Counterpoint, 1996. 241 pp.Robert Aitken narrates his over forty-year journey into Zen, elucidating not only his spiritual journey but also reflecting the Americanization of Zen Buddhism. He was introduced to Zen Buddhism during World War II as an internee in a camp for enemy civilians in Kobe, Japan. Original Dwelling Place is Aitken’s (...) ninth book to explore a series of topics that accent his personal journey into Zen. He has gathered a series of essays about the texts and lineage teachers with whom he studied over the years. In the opening section, entitled “Ancestors,” he pays homage to the masters [End Page 212] who influenced his own Zen practice. He writes, “All of my guides have passed away, but they are alive in my mind and body” (p. 5). The book reflects his continuing bond with those deceased teachers who exercised a vital presence and environmental influence within his life. He shares some stories, personal insights, and legacies of some of his guides, such as Nyogen Senzaki, Soen Roshi, Blyth Sensei, and D. T. Suzuki. I found his essay on the legacy of Dwight Goddard filling in many personal details of a pioneer Western Buddhist who significantly contributed to the Americanization of Buddhism. In many ways, Aitken’s own spiritual development and Original Dwelling Place recapitulate the Americanization of Zen Buddhism, providing some important insights into that process of Buddhist acculturation.Yet Aitken does not limit his guides to twentieth-century ones. He brings alive the classical discourses and relates them to contemporary life. Throughout his essays, I was struck by how alive and dynamic Aitken’s Mahayana contemplative vision and practice are. There is a spirit of “contemplative action” that collapses the duality of meditative practice and living that discovers the truth dynamically within a matrix of open living. As a Christian practitioner of Ignatian spirituality, I found many parallels to the Jesuit ideal of being “contemplative in action.” Aitken’s essays elucidate an ongoing dynamic dialectic that fluctuates between meditative reflection and the world of experience—reminding me at times of the contemplative Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, and at other times of the Jesuit poet-activist, Daniel Berrigan.The reader garners an aesthetic sense that classical Zen texts have been an integral part of his journey and have provided him with a platform to reflect on topics such as marriage, death, the use of money, sexuality, and Zen practice. Some of his essays have a meditative quality, drawing the reader into an web of intertextuality and experience where Zen teachers and Western poets engage in a contemplative path of pleasure expressed in awareness of the everyday dewdrop world. There were moments that I envisioned reading a particular essay on retreat, for they had a meditative quality that reminded me of some the writings of Thomas Merton. Like Merton, Robert Aitken does not merely probe meditative experience but attempts to interrogate the everyday experiences of Western Buddhists from meditative awareness. Most Japanese Buddhists, he notes, are married within Shinto ceremonies, and Western Buddhists have resurrected old Buddhist marriage ceremonies seldom used by Japanese practitioners. Western Buddhist marriage ceremonies, Aitken notes, are a relatively new tradition that often blends ceremonies from The Book of Common Prayer with Buddhist rituals. He ends his short essay on marriage with final reflections on how marriage and family form a little sangha.In “Death: A Zen Buddhist Perspective,” Aitken breaks new ground by noting how Buddhists face the fact of death and find solace in impermanence. He quotes the Japanese haiku poet, Isa Kobayashi (1763–1827), grieving at the loss of his baby daughter:The dewdrop world is the dewdrop world, and yet—and yet(p. 124). [End Page 213]Isa looks desperately for something to give him hope but only finds comfort in his grief. Aitken points out that within grief is emancipation and that bereavement can be a good teacher. He develops some reflections on a highly underdeveloped topic within Buddhism: grieving and the transformation of grief into solace.Aitken writes on political revolution and the matters of ethics. He addresses... (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper aims to show how a nineteenth-century Korean scholar's mathematical study reflects the Korean intellectual environment of his time by focusing on the rule of false double position and the method of root extraction. There were two major trends in Korean mathematics of the early nineteenth century: the first was “Tongsan,” literally “Eastern Mathematics,” which largely depended on Chinese mathematics of the Song and Yuan period adopting counting rod calculation; the second trend was Western mathematics, which was transmitted by (...) the Jesuits and their Chinese collaborators from the late sixteenth century. There was also an intellectual transition in late eighteenth-century Korea when mathematics, which had been of only minor interest for Confucian scholars, became an important part of Confucian pursuits. We can gain an insight into the history of mathematics in Korea by examining and understanding Hong Kil-chu's mathematical studies and the context of the academic world of his time. (shrink)

This essay briefly explores the phenomenon of nepantla in three representative cross-cultural encounters, in both initial and later phases: Spain-Latin America, England-India, and the West-Japan. Nepantla is a mode of in-betweenness rooted in the historical encounter between cultures and leading to mediation of various kinds. For Latin America, the essay focuses on Columbus, the Cortés-Moctezuma encounter, the Aztec-Franciscan dialogues of 1524, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. For India, the essay comments on the East India Company, English education in (...) India, Lord Macaulay, Dean Mahomet, Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, and a number of other writers from the early, mid and late twentieth century. For Japan, the essay considers, first, Japanese reactions to missionary activities in the sixteenth century, then the opening up of Japan in the nineteenth century, the Meiji Restoration and its literature, and in particular authors like Fukuzawa, Sōseki, Endō, Kawabata, and Ōe. The essay argues, finally, that nepantla is a useful and dynamic approach to intercultural encounters that complements approaches indicated by terms like colonialism, imperialism, contact zones, hybridity or métissage, liminality, de-colonization, or post-coloniality. (shrink)

A social responsibility (SR) theory of the press has emerged in various democratic societies worldwide since World War II. The Hutchins Commission in the United States is the source of this paradigm in some cases, but a similar emphasis on serving society rather than commerce or government has also arisen in parallel fashion without any connection to Hutchins. Professionalism and codes of professional ethics are too narrow to serve as the framework for a global SR paradigm of the 21st century. (...) Instead, universal ethical principles are the most appropriate framework, and the cross-cultural axis around which these principles revolve is the sacredness of human life. Embedded in the protonorm of human sacredness are such ethical principles as human dignity, truthtelling, and nonmaleficence. These principles are citizen ethics rather than professional ethics; they are set in the social domain where SR gets its rationale. They provide a frame of reference internationally for assessing local news media practices and formulating codes of ethics. (shrink)

The problem of the intensification and remission of qualities was a crux for philosophical, theological, and scientific thought in the Middle Ages. It was raised in Antiquity with this remark of Aristotle: some qualities, as accidental beings, admit the more and the less. Admitting more and less is not a trivial property, since it belongs neither to every category of being, nor to every quality. Rather it applies only to states and dispositions such as virtue, to affections of bodies such (...) as heat and sweetness, and to affections of soul such as anger. However, the property of admitting more and less was a matter of importance for the qualitative physics that had reigned up to about the time of Descartes, a physics which was concerned with concepts such as heat, coldness, lightness, heaviness, and so on. (shrink)

ArgumentAfter World War II, blood groups became a symbol of anti-racial science. This paper aims to shed new light on the post-WWII history of blood groups and race, illuminating the postcolonial revitalization of racial serology in South Korea. In the prewar period, Japanese serologists developed a serological anthropology of Koreans in tandem with Japanese colonialism. The pioneering Korean hematologist Yi Samyŏl (1926–2015), inspired by decolonization movements during the 1960s, excavated and appropriated colonial serological anthropology to prove Koreans as (...) biologically independent from the Japanese. However, his racial serology of Koreans shared colonial racism with Japanese anthropology, despite his anti-colonial nationalism. (shrink)

This article rehearses the critical theory of Craig Calhoun’s book on nationalism and applies his threefold typology of ‘project, discourse, evaluation’ to the peculiar case of modern Philippine nationalism. The Republic of the Philippines is a marine archipelago of over 7100 islands and 85 million people of various ethnic, linguistic and cultural identities. Because of its history of colonizations (Spanish, American, Japanese), the predominance of Christianity, and the lack of a unified or prestigious pre-modern religious, political or economic (...) order, the Philippines is frequently positioned as ‘in but not of Asia’. Because Filipinos are made acutely aware of their peculiar trajectory as a modern nation-state and precarious position within the region, the dominant discourses of ‘the Philippines’ have been too anxious to construct a genealogy of the modern nation-state as telos and to assert some form of ‘Filipino’ identity and spirit. Now that the nationalist moment of contemporary nation-states has passed with the fading of the post-Second World War ‘developmentalist state’ project and its usurpation since the 1980s by ‘the globalization’ project, an opportunity is afforded for a changing of our critical lens from searches for revolutionary projects of founding myths and ends, of romantic nationalisms, or of nostalgic returns to pre-modern idylls (whether ethnic or colonial). Accordingly, this article has three parts. Part One provides a brief synopsis of Calhoun’s arguments about nationalism. Part Two applies these critical insights to the case of Philippine nationalism, especially as it is expressed in the historical and social sciences. Part Three then introduces alternative ways of thinking about the Philippines as sites of cultural hybridity and traffic. (shrink)

Most of the writers who contributed to the issue were locked up at the time in Italian jails.... I was trying to draw the attention of the American Left, which still believed in Eurocommunism, to the fate of Autonomia. The survival of the last politically creative movement in the West was at stake, but no one in the United States seemed to realize that, or be willing to listen. Put together as events in Italy were unfolding, the Autonomia issue--which has (...) no equivalent in Italy, or anywhere for that matter--arrived too late, but it remains an energizing account of a movement that disappeared without bearing a trace, but with a big future still ahead of it.--Sylvère LotringerSemiotext is reissuing in book form its legendary magazine issue Italy: Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, originally published in New York in 1980. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi with the direct participation of the main leaders and theorists of the Autonomist movement, this volume is the only first-hand document and contemporaneous analysis that exists of the most innovative post-'68 radical movement in the West. The movement itself was broken when Autonomia members were falsely accused of being the intellectual masterminds of the Red Brigades; but even after the end of Autonomia, this book remains a crucial testimony of the way this creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological, and nonrepresentative political movement of young workers and intellectuals anticipated issues that are now confronting us in the wake of Empire. In the next two years, Semiotext will publish eight books by such Italian "Post-Fordist" intellectuals as Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, and Bifo, as they update the theories of Autonomia for the new century.Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext, lives in New York and Baja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions, 2007). Christian Marazzi, an Italian economist, lives in Switzerland. He is the author of Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy and Sock's Place, both forthcoming from Semiotext. (shrink)

Sixteenth Century philosophy was a unique synthesis of several philosophical frameworks, a blend of old and new, including but not limited to scholasticism, humanism, Neo-Thomism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. It was a century that witnessed culturally and philosophically significant moments whose impact still is felt today—some examples include the emergence of Jesuits, the height of the witchcraze, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of philosophical skepticism, Pietro Pomponazzi’s controversial reexamination of traditional understandings of the soul’s mortality, and the deflation of the (...) metaphysical status of substantial forms. Unlike most historical overviews of this moment in philosophy’s history, The Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy does not simplify this colorful period with the application of the dichotomies traditionally applied to this century, such as the misguidingly clear line once drawn between scholasticism and humanism. The Companion includes essays covering the following astonishingly diverse set of topics: philosophical methodologies of the time, the importance of the discovery of the new world, the rise of classical scholarship, trends in logic and logical theory, Nominalism, Avveroism, Neo-Thomism, the Jesuits, the Reformation, Neo-stoicism, the soul’s immortality, witchcraft, Skepticism, the philosophies of language and science and politics, Cosmology, women’s rights, the nature of the understanding, causality, ethics, freedom of the will, natural law, the emergence of the individual in society, the nature of wisdom, and the love of god. And, throughout, the Companion seeks not to compartmentalize these philosophical matters, but instead to show that close attention paid to their continuity may help reveal both the diversity and the profound coherence of the philosophies that emerged in the sixteenth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chinese Buddhism and the Threat of Atheism in Seventeenth-Century EuropeThierry MeynardWhen the Europeans first came to Asia, they met with the multiform presence of Buddhism. They gradually came to understand that a common religious tradition connected the different brands of Buddhism found in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Japan, and China. I propose here to examine a presentation of Buddhism written in Guangzhou by the Italian Jesuit Prospero Intorcetta (1626-1696) around (...) the year 1668. This text was later edited by the Flemish Jesuit Philippe Couplet (1623-1693) and published in Paris in 1687, within an encyclopedia on Chinese thought titled Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (The Chinese Philosopher Confucius, hereafter called CSP).In the first part of this study, I shall introduce the background of the Jesuit encounter with Buddhism, first in Japan and then in China, as well as their literary production on the subject. Then, I shall examine Intorcetta's presentation of Chinese Buddhism, especially his understanding of the two faces of Buddhism: Pure Land Buddhism, which he categorized as superstition, and Chan Buddhism, categorized as atheism. These two notions of superstition and atheism seem contradictory, but in fact they are derived from Intorcetta's interpretation of the Buddhist theory of the "two truths." I shall conclude with an evaluation of Intorcetta's account. Because this early presentation of Buddhism exists only in Latin, I have inserted excerpts that I have translated.Historical Background of the Encounter with BuddhismSince the sixteenth century, missionaries have traveled to different regions of Asia and collected information about the religions they encountered, including Buddhism. They also exchanged information among themselves, asking questions of colleagues in order to confirm and complete information. The missionary reports were sent to Europe for their superiors and were sometimes published as such, but more often incorporated into larger works. [End Page 3]The First Encounter, from Japan to ChinaAmong the first reports reaching Europe about Buddhism were the letters of the Spanish Jesuit Francis-Xavier (1506-1552), who drew information from Yajiro, a Japa nese he met in Malacca in 1547. During his own stay of more than two years in Japan, in 1549-1551, Francis-Xavier had exchanges with monks and could progress in his understanding of Buddhism. His letters were very influential among the network of Jesuit schools in Europe, being copied and read at many venues.1 Other missionaries in Japan, like Cosme de Torres (1510-1570), Luís Fróis (1532-1597), and Baltasar Gago (1515-1583), went further in understanding Buddhism.Also, when, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Jesuit missionaries approached Buddhism in China, their understanding was already shaped by fifty years of knowledge gained in Japan. Just as in Japan, the China Jesuits were interested in Buddhism because it provided them with an indigenous vocabulary in which to express Christian ideas. Thus, the missionary was perceived as a kind of Buddhist monk. The symbolic identification with Buddhism went even further than in Japan, because for more than ten years in Guangdong, from 1579 to 1595, they adopted Buddhist dress and shaved their heads.However, as the missionaries deepened their understanding of the Buddhist doctrine, they realized that many tenets could not be reconciled with Christianity. Since they were greatly concerned about disseminating the orthodox faith and avoiding dubious theories, which they believed to be the tricks of the devil, they distanced themselves from Buddhism and became closer to Confucianism, whose discourse, which focused on moral life in the present world, did not directly conflict with the supernatural truths of Christianity. While Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) had initially started interacting with Chinese culture by using Buddhism, later on Ricci abandoned this approach and started to use Confucianism as the main medium. In the Tianzhu shiyi (True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), Ricci wrote for his Chinese readers a strong refutation of the Buddhist doctrine from the standpoint of Aristotelian philosophy.2 He criticized the concept of selflessness (wuwo) on metaphysical grounds, writing that everyone should draw their existence from an ultimate origin. In his Della entrata della Compagnia di Gesù e Christianità nella China (Entry of the Society of Jesus into... (shrink)

For decades the papal tradition has renounced the term ‘war’ as something around which to build an ethical approach. One can sympathize with this: resort to war seems the consequence of ethical failure and brings in its train a host of brutalities including rape, torture, and murder that harm both victims and perpetrators. But that view of ‘war’ is an incomplete representation of the possibilities of the uses of force to secure legitimate political goods. Thus the popes have struggled to (...) maintain a clear voice in the face of abject tragedies like the Russian invasion of Ukraine: on the one hand, Pope Francis condemns war in an almost absolute manner; on the other, he recognizes the legitimacy of Ukrainian defensive uses of force. In so doing, of course, he merely abides the so-called ‘just war theory’ he seems to have discarded. My contribution will focus on the current state of the just war in Catholic teaching. I will maintain the state remains where it has been since at least the middle of the twentieth century: skeptical about the capacity of states to judge in terms of international law, but cognizant of their right to defend themselves against ongoing aggression. (shrink)

Christian ethical practice has historically fallen short, when we consider the histories of European colonial violence from the sixteenth century and the transatlantic slave trade in Africans. Today, Christian ethics can fail to uphold a standard of resistance to contemporary evils, including racial injustice. To what extent can Christian ethics break with this history and be saved? This article considers the ongoing colonial tendencies of Christian ethics and theological education in Britain, before considering the centrality of decolonisation, primarily ‘of (...) the mind’. In the latter part, it turns to examples of anti-colonial Christian ethics, in the work of Robert Beckford, Anthony Reddie, Anupama Ranawana and Anderson Jeremiah. It ends by giving attention to what decolonisation might mean in religious and theological education, as we seek to create spaces for learning in which all people's bodies, minds and voices are welcomed and honoured. (shrink)

At the end of the sixteenth century, Friar Juan de Torquemada watched the game of volador on the central plaza in Mexico. At the top of a pole some twenty meters high there was a small pivoting platform. Four ropes were wound around the top of the pole and held in place by a wooden frame. Five men dressed in feathery costumes making them look like birds climbed up the shaft. One of them reached the narrow platform and began (...) to dance. Then the other four bird-men tied themselves to the ends of the ropes and plunged into space, head down, held by the ropes around their waists. This initiated a spectacular circular flight in ever widening rings as the cords unwound. They straightened up only at the last moment, just in time to put their feet on the ground, dizzy and staggering. But on that particular day, one of the dancers was not to straighten himself up. The rope had been badly attached and broke, dropping the man like a heavy mass to the ground, lifeless. The Franciscan at once used this as an argument to demand that the Viceroy prohibit this game. But the civil authorities refused to do so, to the monk's great consternation. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ Les Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, Mémoires de la Chine abordent de nombreux sujets de la vie sociale parmi lesquels l'infanticide, toléré en Chine encore au XVIIIe siècle, jugé comme un crime par les Occidentaux. Par-delà les jugements moralisateurs, les missionnaires jésuites expliquent cette tradition par la situation économique. La « sociologie » de Montesquieu découvre, en deçà de cette raison, une série de rapports causaux entre les moeurs et la géographie. L'exposition des enfants par leurs parents s'inscrit dans cette (...) relation dans laquelle l'économie peut être envisagée comme une cause seconde. ABSTRACT The Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, Mémoires de la Chine deal with a number of features of social life among which infanticide which was still tolerated in China in the XVIIIth century, while it was considered as a crime in the West. Beyond moral judgements, Jesuit missionaries ascribe this tradition to the economic situation. Montesquieu's " sociology" discovers, beneath this reason, a series of causal links between mores and geography. The exposure of children by their parents comes within the scope of this relation in which economy can be seen as a second cause. (shrink)

This essay is an introduction and summary of my detailed study under preparation on the idea of Europe in contemporary Spanish thought. An historical interpretation of Spanish civilization from its earliest beginnings to the present time is presented in the article. I undertake the problem of Spain’s European vocation, specific features of its Christian culture, especially Iberian links with the Islamic world and the question of changes in Spanish identity. The article presents reflections on Europe by the (...) Generation of ‘98 Spanish writers and thinkers (chiefly Angel Ganivet, Miguel de Unamuno and Ramiro de Maeztu) who, in the face of defeat (1898) in the Spanish-American War, proclaimed a program of moral and cultural rebirth for Spain. Their ambivalent attitude towards Europe was rejected by José Ortega y Gasset and Salvador de Madariaga, both the most pro-European 20th century Spanish intellectuals. The problem of Spanishrelation to Europe was also widely discussed after the Civil War under General Franco regime. The evolution from initial isolation to a fuller integration with Europe of the regime and its conservative Catholic culture are also shown in the article. Much attention is devoted to the present-day civil and European Spain led by democratic socialists. (shrink)

A prominent feature of Norwegian nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century was its use of Norway’s Viking and medieval history. This use is visible in Norwegian popular and political culture of the period with, among other things, the Norwegianization of city names and the emergence of the Dragon style. This article examines the role of commemoration of Viking heroes in Norwegian street names and memory sites in the period (...) 1850-1940. In doing so, the article identifies who were remembered, when and where, and shows how there was an increase in Viking and medieval street names in the lead-up to 1900. The article also shows how the Norwegian population embraced and partook in the remembrance of these heroes through the case studies of the restoration of Trondheim Cathedral for 1930 and the construction of Haraldshaugen monument in 1872. By comparing these case studies with the spread of street names referencing the medieval, this article shows how there is a correlation between the increase in street names and the popular contributions to the construction of national memorials which suggests an increased participation in the national community. This shows the link between the spread of nationalism and medievalism in Norway in the period leading up to the Second World War opening the way to examine Norwegian medievalism as a component of the popularisation of the idea of an independent Norway. (shrink)

French Jesuit missionaries in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9530-8 Authors Ugo Baldini, Department of Historical and Political Studies, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Padova, Via del Santo 28, 35123 Padova, Italy Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This article discusses three aspects of the history of astrology in seventeenth-century Peru that are of larger interest for the history of science in Latin America: Creole concerns about indigenous idolatry, the impact of the Inquisition on natural philosophy, and communication between scholars within the Spanish colonies and the transatlantic world. Drawing mainly on the scholars Antonio de la Calancha, Juan de Figueroa, and Ruiz de Lozano, along with several Jesuits, the article analyzes how natural and medical astrology took (...) shape in Peru and how they fostered astronomical investigations of the southern skies. While natural and medical astrology, showing New and Old World influences, oscillated between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and between scholasticism and new science, judicial astrology remained undeveloped. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the discourse about astrology took an unexpected turn, reflecting a newly invigorated moral and Christian reading of the heavens that was in part a response to a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with the failure of the extirpation of idolatry campaigns. Inscribing divine and cardinal virtues, the Virgin Mary, Christian saints, and Greco-Roman allegories into the heavens was considered a way to finally solve the problem of idolatry and to convey Creole greatness. (shrink)

Unlike many commentators who tend to see Schweitzer's mission one-sidedly, I show the coexistence of liberal and conservative elements in his mission. While his mission intent was mostly motivated by the former, his mission practices largely show the latter. In this essay, I analyze them in detail in three parts. I first explain how such opposite elements can coexist by applying Dipesh Chakrabarty's notion of provincializing Europe. Like most nineteenth-century Western liberals, Schweitzer advocated Enlightenment rights for (...) Europeans, but denied them to the colonized. I then argue that Schweitzer's mission was motivated by the liberal elements of his theology. When his critical theology led him to deny the divinity of Jesus, he found a new basis for Christianity in Jesus? ethical activism, which led him to become a medical missionary to Africa. I then examine Schweitzer's conservative practices in Africa: by applying the developmental model of Hegelian-Marxist historicism to African society, Schweitzer opposed both decolonization and advanced learning to Africans. Schweitzer's missionary practices in Africa, I therefore conclude, were more conservative than those of the typical European missionary. (shrink)

Marcantonio Raimondis so-called Caryatid Façade has received scant attention, yet it occupies an important place in the printmakers oeuvre and was widely admired and imitated in the sixteenth century. The image, which features an architectural façade adorned with Caryatid and Persian porticoes and an oversized female capital, does not fit easily with the usual narrative about Raimondis career in Rome, summed up in Vasaris account that he collaborated with Raphael to publicise the masters storie. Rather than being an illustration (...) of a religious or mythological subject, it brings together architectural fantasia, archaeology and Vitruvian studies, reflecting on the origins of the orders and the nature of architectural ornament. Arguably, it is also an indirect trace of Raphaels unfinished projects to reconstruct Rome and to collaborate with humanist Fabio Calvo and others on a new, illustrated edition of Vitruvius. (shrink)

The central question of this conference is whether the media can contribute to high quality social dialogue. The prospects for resolving that question positively in the “sound and fury” depend on recovering the idea of truth. At present the news media are lurching along from one crisis to another with an empty centre. We need to articulate a believable concept of truth as communication's master principle. As the norm of healing is to medicine, justice to politics, critical thinking to education, (...) craftsmanship to engineering, and stewardship to business, so truth-telling is the news profession's occupational norm. Truth-telling is the ethical framework that fundamentally reorders the media's professional culture and enables them to enrich social dialogue rather than undermine it.Historically the mainstream press has defined itself in terms of an objectivist worldview. Centred on human rationality and armed with the scientific method, the facts in news have been said to mirror reality. The aim has been true and incontrovertible accounts of a domain separate from human consciousness. In Bertrand Russell's formula, “truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact” . In the received view, truth is defined in elementary epistemological terms as accurate representation. News corresponds to context-free neutral algorithms, and ethics is equated with impartiality.The attacks on this misguided view of human knowledge had already originated in Giambattista Vico's fantasia and Wilhelm Dilthey's verstehen in the counter-Enlightenment of the 18th century. They have continued with hermeneutics, critical theory in the Frankfurt School, American pragmatism, Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, Gramsci, and in their own way, Lyotard's denial of master narratives and Derrida's sliding signifiers; until the anti-foundationalism of our own day indicates a crisis in correspondence views of truth. Institutional structures remain Enlightenment-driven, but in principle the tide has turned currently toward restricting objectivism to the territory of mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences. In reporting, objectivity has become increasingly controversial as the working press' professional standard, though it will remain entrenched in our ordinary practices of news production and dissemination until an alternative mission for the press is convincingly formulated.The demise of correspondence views of truth has created a predicament for the notion of truth altogether. However, instead of appealing to coherence versions or abandoning the concept, truth needs to be relocated in the moral sphere. Truth is a problem of axiology rather than epistemology. With the dominant scheme no longer tenable, truth should become the province of ethicists who can reconstruct it as the news media's contribution to social dialogue.When truth is articulated in terms of a moral framework, we can mold its richly textured meaning around the Hebrew emeth , the Greek aletheia . In Serbo-Croatian the true is justified as with plumbline in carpentry. In the powerful wheel imagery of the Buddhist tradition, truth is the immovable axle. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa presumes that sufferings from apartheid can be healed through truthful testimony. In Ghandhi's “satyagrapha,” the power of truth through the human spirit eventually wins over force . Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics contends correctly that a truthful account lays hold of the context, motives, and presuppositions involved .Telling the truth depends on the quality of discernment so that penultimates do not gain ultimacy. Truth means, in other words, to strike gold, to get at “the core, the essence, the nub, the heart of the matter” . For Henry David Thoreau – though addressing a different issue – when we are truthful, we attempt to “drive life into a corner and¼if it proves to be mean, why then to get the genuine meanness out of it and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by personal experience and be able to give a true account of the encounter” . For the former secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, “the most dangerous of all moral dilemmas is when we are obliged to conceal truth in order to help the truth be victorious” . In the Talmud, the liar's punishment is that no one believes him.Augustine , professor of rhetoric at Milan and later Bishop of Hippo, illustrates a non-correspondence view of truth. His rhetorical theory is a major contribution to the philosophy of communication, contradicting the highly secular and linear view of the ancient Greeks. As with Aristotle, rhetoric entails reasoned judgement for Augustine; however, he “break[s] away from Graeco-Roman rhetoric, moving instead toward ¼rhetoric as aletheiac act” . Rhetoric for him is not knowledge-producing or opinion-producing but truth-producing . The Epistolae Doctrina Christiana scourges the value-neutral, technical language of “word merchants” without wisdom.Truth is not fundamentally a prescriptive statement. The aletheiac act in Augustine “tends to be more relational than propositional, a dialogically interpersonal, sacramentally charitable act rather than a statement¼taking into account and being motivated by [the cardinal virtues] faith, hope, and charity” . The truth for him does not merely make things clear, but motivates us to belief and action. In truthful communication for Augustine, “it is not enough to seek to move men's minds, merely for the sake of power; instead, the power to move is to be used to lead men to truth”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social ThoughtCharles W. ChristianBonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought Edited by Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 304 pp. $25.00Countless books have been written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., assessing their individual leadership in the areas of social justice and theology in the twentieth century. Relatively few (...) works have brought these two individuals together in comparative analysis. This book, edited by Willis [End Page 216] Jenkins (assistant professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School) and Jennifer M. McBride (visiting lecturer at Candler Divinity School), seeks to do that; it brings together a wide array of scholars in the fields of ethics, theology, pastoral ministry, political theory, African American studies, and feminist theology.As McBride points out in her introduction, the “significant differences in their historic, sociopolitical contexts” can present challenges in comparing the work of these two men and in seeking to contemporize them (8). However, the thought and life of both martyrs “demand[s] action”; in other words, the “thought” of both Bonhoeffer and King remains incomplete without “courageous, constructive, redemptive social engagement” (3). It is in this spirit that the book unfolds.The book is divided into four parts. The first four chapters compose part 1 (titled “Critical Distance”), which takes a broader look at the legacies, key concepts, and limitations or critiques of the thought of Bonhoeffer and King. For example, the second chapter by Stephen R. Haynes (“King and Bonhoeffer as Protestant Saints”) reminds us of the perils of the larger-than-life legacies of both these individuals. When noteworthy persons become personalities or cultural heroes, key aspects of their legacies can be minimized or overlooked. This is particularly important in contemporary American settings where politicians and commentators tend to reduce the legacies of both Bonhoeffer and King to fit their own political agendas.Part 2 pays specific attention to the influence of Bonhoeffer and King on matters related to social justice, such as poverty, racism, and violence. Among the notable contributions in this section is the chapter by Craig J. Slane that deals with the “unexpected turn toward violence” (112) for Bonhoeffer during his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler during World War II. Part 3 looks at the ways in which the lives and teaching (and especially preaching, in King’s life in particular) of Bonhoeffer and King are instruments of social redemption. In addition to noting the influence of Niebuhr’s emphasis on social sin and social redemption on King’s preaching and leadership, it points out that both Bonhoeffer and King were deeply influenced by the economic and social upheavals of their time; their preaching, teaching, and writing sought to address, in concrete ways, the racial, economic, and political realities of their contexts. In part 4, “Peacemaking,” four authors highlight the contributions King and Bonhoeffer have made to peacemaking and the influence these contributions continue to have. They discuss both men’s commitment to nonviolence and pacifism and the particular challenges this commitment created for them (especially for Bonhoeffer, given his participation in a plot to overthrow Hitler).The essays in this book do not present these two martyrs as unblemished. The book contains rich discussions that honestly assess their personal struggles [End Page 217] of conscience as well as their contextual struggles with such issues as the role of women. Furthermore, the reader will find a solid introduction to the lives and thought of both men while at the same time sitting in on a diverse conversation about how their influential interpretations of the Christian faith can continue to be fleshed out. May this kind of conversation (and action) continue!Charles W. ChristianMount Vernon Nazarene UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This article analyses the development of the subjective concept of rights amongst Jesuit missionaries in Brazil during the sixteenth century, in the context of their cultural encounters with the Tupi Indians, and the ensuing debates over the justification of the natives' voluntary slavery. Usually associated with Hugo Grotius' natural law theory, the subjective concept of rights was originally developed by Jesuit theologians in Portugal, and justificatory practices in the missionary enterprise overseas formed the context in which this concept became (...) current within the Society of Jesus. This article traces such a development in the missions in Brazil. (shrink)

European scholarship developed a strong a tradition of Oriental studies, especially from the nineteenth century. A Dutch hispanismo was born from the pioneering spirit of some scholars who realized the importance of drawing more attention to the Spanish culture and language in the late nineteenth century. Notably, the history of al-Andalus did not prompt any great interest, except for the scholar Reinhart Dozy whose work exerted a major influence both in his time and later. This article aims to examine (...) whether Dozy’s writings on the topic of the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula tend to stereotype both the Arab and the Christian Latin cultures as a result of his analyses of historical sources. Some of the Dozy’s source interpretations, which have been thoroughly studied elsewhere, are brought here and refuted in an attempt to raise the issue of the impact of bias in a text presentation when it comes to the reader’s assumption about Muslims and Christians from the medieval historical period. In addition, this article points out some putative determinant factors in Dozy’s analyses of the sources based on his known private and academic life. We may conclude that Dozy’s approach to the subject of Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula fails to present the account of this Iberian period in all its otherness. Nowadays, this abridgment can be overcome with an integrated approach in which perspectives emerging from different disciplines are applied in order to render interesting empirical and theoretical insights. (shrink)

"Das Rechtssystem geht davon aus, dass der Mensch – und nur der Mensch – eine natürliche Person ist. Das sei ein Irrtum, argumentiert Malte-Christian Gruber, denn die Rechtssubjektivität wird keineswegs alleine mit dem bloßen Menschsein begründet. Es ist die sittliche Autonomie, die den Menschen zu einem »Subjekt, dessen Handlungen einer Zurechnung fähig sind« (Kant) und mithin zur Person macht. Personen werden nicht mit dem Menschsein als solchem identifiziert, sondern durch die Zuschreibung von Handlungs- und Rechtsträgerschaft. Eine solche funktionale Vorstellung von (...) Rechtssubjektivität ist prinzipiell auch dazu imstande, neben Menschen noch weitere autonome Agenten als Träger von Rechten und Pflichten ein- zusetzen, z.B. technische Artefakte und andere nicht-menschliche Agenten. Christoph Menke macht dagegen darauf aufmerksam, dass die Erfindung neuer Rechte das eigentliche Bewegungsgesetz der politischen Emanzipation in der Moderne war. Das begann mit den bürgerlichen Revolutionen und ist immer noch das generelle Modell, mit dem Politik und Theorie operieren, die neue Rechte für nicht-menschliche Lebewesen und Artefakte einfordern. So wie im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert die rechtliche Emanzipation zunächst über die Grenzen bürgerlicher Subjektivität hinausgeführt hat und soziale und kulturelle Rechte erfand, so sollen wir nun den weiteren, konsequenten Schritt tun und auch noch die Bindung der juridischen Anerkennung an die Kategorie menschlicher Subjektivität aufbrechen. Auch Bio- und Artefakte sollen als eigenständige Rechtssubjekte rekonstruiert werden. Es fehlt ihnen allerdings etwas, das in den emanzipatorischen Kämpfen der Vergangenheit schlechthin grundlegend war: Ein Träger von Rechten zu sein, hieß, ein Fordernder von Rechten, ja, ein Kämpfer für Rechte gewesen zu sein. Man konnte keine rechtliche Person als Träger von Rechten sein, ohne ein politisches Subjekt als Kämpfer und Denker von Rechten gewesen zu sein. Wenn die Bindung der rechtlichen Personalität an die menschliche Subjektivität aufgelöst wird, damit es Bio- und Artefakt-Rechte geben kann, löst sich zugleich auch diese Einheit von rechtlicher Personalität und politischer Subjektivität auf, die die moderne Idee der Rechte definiert hatte. The legal system assumes that human beings – and only human beings – are natural persons. That is erroneous, argues Malte-Christian Gruber, because legal subjectivity isn’t founded in humanity alone. It is moral autonomy that makes man into a “subject whose actions are capable of attribution” (Kant) and thus into a person. Personhood is not identified with being human as such, but by the attribution of actions and legal ownership. Besides human beings, such a functional concept of legal subjectivity can in principle also be applied to other autonomous agents as holder of rights and obligations, e.g. techno- logical artifacts and other non-human agents. Christoph Menke in turn points out that the invention of new rights was the actual law of motion of political emancipation in modern times. This began with the bourgeois revolutions and is still the general model with which politics and theory operate to claim new rights for non-human creatures and artifacts. Just as in the 19th and 20th centuries, the legal emancipation initially led beyond the limits of bourgeois subjectivity and in- vented social and cultural rights, so should we make a further consequent step and break with the dependence of juridical recognition on the category of human subjectivity. Also bio- and artifacts are to be reconstructed as independent legal entities. However, they lack something that was absolutely fundamental in the emancipatory struggles of the past: to be a subject of rights meant to have demanded rights, indeed, to have been a fighter for rights. One could not be a legal person and holder of rights without having been a political subject as fighter and thinker of rights. To suspend the dependence of legal personhood on human subjectivity so that there may be bio- and artifact-rights also means to dissolve the unity between legal personality and political subjectivity that once defined the modern idea of rights. ". (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like (...) Jesus, at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

Book Reviewed in this article: Traditional Sayings in the Old Testament. By Carole R. Fontaine. Pp. viii, 279, Sheffield, The Almond Press, 1982, £17.95, £8.95. The First Day of the New Creation: The Resurrection and the Christian Faith. By Vesilin Keisch. Pp.206, Crestwood, New York, St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1982, £6.25. The First Day of the New Creation: The Resurrection and the Christian Faith. By Vesilin Keisch. Pp.206, Crestwood, New York, St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1982, £6.25. The Resurrection of Jesus: (...) A Jewish Perspective. By Pinchas Lapide. Pp.160, London, SPCK, 1983, 4.95. Easter Enigma. By John Wenham. Pp.162, Exeter, Paternoster Press, 1984, £2.95. The Anastasis: the Resurrection of Jesus as an Historical Event. By J. Duncan M. Derrett. Pp.xiv, 166, Shipston‐on‐Stour, P. Drinkwater, 1982, £5.00. The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity. By Christopher Rowland. Pp. xii, 562, London, SPCK, 1982, £22.50. Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle from the Masai. By Vincent J. Donovan. Pp. viii, 200, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.50. Basics of a Roman Catholic Theology. By William A. Van Roo, S.J. Pp.387, Rome, Gregorian University Press, 1982, $21.00. Charisms and Charismatic Renewal: a Biblical and Theological Study. By Francis A. Sullivan. Pp.184, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1982, £5.95. Holiness and Politics. By Peter Hinchliff. Pp.214, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982, £8.95. Rational Theology and the Creativity of God. By Keith Ward. Pp.240, Oxford, Blackwell, 1982, £14.00. The Point of Christology. By S.M. Ogden. Pp.xii, 193, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.95. Fullness of Humanity: Christ's Humanness and Ours. By T.E. Pollard. Pp.126, Sheffield, The Almond Press, 1982, £9.95, £5.95. Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy. By Dennis Richard Danielson. Pp.xi, 292, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £20.00. Biblical Tradition in Blake's Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. By Leslie Tannenbaum. Pp.xiii, 373, Princeton University Press, 1982, £17.60. The Inner Journey of the Poet and Other Papers. By Kathleen Raine, edited by Brian Keeble. Pp.xii, 208, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1982, £9.95.iVol. 34: Horayot and Niddah. Translated by Jacob Neusner. Pp.xiii, 243, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1982, £17.50. Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire A.D. 312–460. By Ed. Hunt. Pp. £+ 269, Oxford University Press, 1982, £16.50. Constantine versus Christ: The Triumph of Ideology. By Alistair Kee. Pp.186, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.95. Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity. By Peter Brown. Pp.347, London, Faber and Faber, 1982, £10.50. Elishe: History of Vardan and the Armenian War. Translation and commentary by Robert W. Thomson. Pp.x, 353, 1 map, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982, £21.00. Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe: Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes. Edited by Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick and David Dumville. Pp.x, 406, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £39.00. Letters from Ireland 1228–1229 by Stephen of Lexington. Translated with an introduction by B.W. O'Dwyer. Pp.vii, 292, Kalamazoo, Cistercian Publications, 1982, $24.95. The Occupation of Celtic Sites in Ireland by the Canons Regular of St Augustine and the Cistercians. By Geraldine Carville. Pp.ix, 158, Kalamazoo, Cistercian Publications, 1982, $13.95. Chartres: The Masons who built a Legend. By John James. Pp.200, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £17.50. Temples, Churches and Mosques: A Guide to the Appreciation of Religious Architecture. By J.G. Davies. Pp.x, 262, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £12.50. The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and their Myth. By Peter Partner. Pp.xxi, 209. Oxford University Press, 1982, £12.95. The Italian Crusades: The Papal‐Angevin Alliance and the Crusades Against Christian Lay Powers, 1254–1343. By Norman Housley. Pp.xi, 293, Oxford, Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1982, £17.50. The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394. Edited and Translated by L.C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey. Pp.lxxvii, 563. Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1982, £42.00. Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts. By Berndt Hamm. Pp.xv, 378, Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1982, 168 DM. Erasmi Opera omnia, IX, 2: Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Apologia respondens ad ea quae Iambus Lopis Stunica taxavrat in prima duntaxat Novi Testamenti aeditione. Edited by Henk Jan de Jonge. Pp.292, Amsterdam, North‐Holland Publishing Company, 1983, 280 guilders. The Christian Polity of John Calvin. By Harro Höpfl. Pp.x, 303, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £27.50. Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God. By John Calvin, translated with an Introduction by J.K.S. Reid. Pp.191, Cambridge, James Clarke & Co., 1982, £5.95. Spanish Protestants and Reformers in the Sixteenth Century: A Bibliography. By A. Gordon Kinder. Pp.108, London, Grant & Cutler, 1983, £6.80. Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church. By Peter Lake. Pp.viii, 357, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £27.50. Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of Elizabethan Catholics. By Peter Holmes. Pp.viii, 279, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £22.50. Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By Keith L. Sprunger. Pp.xiii, 485, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1982, 172 guilders. John Toland and the Deist Controversy. By Robert E. Sullivan. Pp.viii, 355, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982, £19.95. Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England. By Stephen A. Marini. Pp. 213, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982, £11.55. Religion and Society in North America: An Annotated Bibliography. Edited by Robert deV: Brunkow. Pp.xi, 515, Santa Barbara, ABC‐Clio; Oxford, EBC‐Clio, 1983, £57.75. Charles Lowder and the Ritualist Movement. By Lida Ellsworth. Pp.vi, 234, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1982, £17.95. How the Pope became Infallible: Pius IX and the Politics of Persuasion. By August Bernhard Hasler. Pp.xi, 383, New York, Doubleday, 1981, $14.95; London, Sheldon Pres, 1982, £15.00. Hauptsache der Papst ist katholisch. Edited by Bruno Nies. Pp.104, Salzburg, Otto Müller, 1982, öS 140. Religious Change in Contemporary Poland: Secularization and Politics. By Maciej Pomian‐Srednicki. Pp.227, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, £12.50. World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World. Edited by David B. Barrett. Pp.1010, Nairobi, Oxford University Press, 1982, £55.00. Probability and Evidence. By Paul Horwich. Pp.vii, 146, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £15.00. Philosophical Foundations of Probability Theory. By Roy Weatherford. Pp.xi, 282, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £15.00. The Origins of Greek Thought. By Jean‐Pierre Vernant. Pp.144, London, Methuen, 1982, £9.95. Portraying Analogy. By J.F. Ross. Pp.xi, 244, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £20.00. The Marriage of East and West. By Bede Griffiths. Pp.224, London, Collins, 1982, £5.95. The Religious Experience: A Socio‐Psychological Perspective. By C.D. Batson & W.L. Ventis Pp.ix, 356, New York, Oxford University Press, 1982, £18.50,£9.95. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading BayleJohn Christian LaursenThomas M. Lennon. Reading Bayle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 202. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $19.95.One of the more philosophically interesting things about Pierre Bayle is the difficulty of interpreting his work. A myriad of interpretations have been advanced, but "the whole is [still] a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery"—to apply David Hume's famous judgment about religion to Bayle's work. This (...) book proposes a Bakhtinian reading of Bayle's philosophical activity, which means that Bayle is understood as letting his interlocutors speak for themselves in an ongoing dialogue over which he does not have full control and in which no one "wins." Bakhtin thought that Dostoevsky was the first major author to do this, but Lennon shows that he was anticipated by Bayle.The discussion is broken up into sections on Bayle's views of integrity, authority, toleration, idolatry, and providence. Integrity turns out to be largely a matter of honesty and fairness in dialogue, and at times it sounds like Bayle is prefiguring Habermas and discourse ethics or recent Anglo-American theories of deliberative democracy.Bayle's view of authority emerges from his analysis of the fact/law (fait/droit) distinction. [End Page 278] This was part of larger debates among Jansenists, Jesuits, and other philosophers such as Arnauld and Malebranche. Here, Lennon's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century philosophy is put to good use. He shows that in Bayle's hands the distinction cannot hold up, as questions of fact and law are always mutually dependent and each can undermine the other. The upshot is that in the absence of truths of fact or law, dialogue is all that we have. That is good, because history cannot be used as a tool of oppression or homogenization if dialogue must go on forever.Some of the claims about Bayle that are advanced here are debatable. That Bayle "treated everyone with dignity" (44) is simply not true of his treatment of millenarians and others that he thought were fanatics. Rather than extending "toleration almost without limit" (74), he was downright intolerant of such folks. Lennon suggests that Bayle may not have fully thought through the question of the conscientious persecutor (85n.). It would have been appropriate to mention Bayle's reflections on this matter in his last work, the Réponse aux questions d'un provincial.The book contains valuable accounts of aspects of Bayle's debates with Pierre Jurieu, in which it often emerges that there was no great gulf of principle between the two arch-enemies. Disagreements with Ruth Whelan and Elisabeth Labrousse add to the interest of Lennon's discussion.Idolatry is one of Bayle's chief targets, and he finds it above all in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Lennon nicely shows how this amounts to Spinozism, which in turn explains Bayle's hostility to both Spinoza and Rome. Both stifle Bakhtinian dialogue.One very interesting section of the book is on lotteries, which have important theological and philosophical significance. Often-forgotten authors like Barbeyrac, Ricotier, and Leti are discussed on this issue. Insights here include the observation that "it is hard to imagine Bayle praying" (146). Indeed it is. Mention of work by I. Hont, T. Hochstrasser, and others on Barbeyrac would have made Lennon's case stronger.One major conclusion is that Bayle's notion of providence and the problem of evil comes down to dialogue as well: evil emerges because God prefers to engage in open-ended dialogue with his creatures, which allows evil even if that is not God's intention (167). On this reading, we have a Kantian Bayle: autonomy is Bayle's most cherished value (182).Lennon's final evaluation of Bayle's fideism is that it is philosophically unsatisfactory. Blind and nonrational reliance on Scripture is, to say the least, undermined by Bayle's inability to establish that God is its author or to found his own beliefs in any way other than education. But if anybody still thinks that Pierre Bayle was merely a compiler and not a philosopher in his own right, this book and a lot of the other recent... (shrink)

This article examines the evidence for the importation of Korean books into Japan, including texts of both Korean authorship and Chinese authorship. Although Korean books had certainly reached Japan well before the 1590s there can be little doubt that the Japanese invasions of Korea in the last decade of the sixteenth century resulted in the widespread looting of Korean books and the arrival in Japan of Korean books on an unprecedented scale. However, there is both documentary evidence and (...) the evidence of extant books in Japan to show that Korean books continued to be imported into Japan after 1600 and that they were highly valued there, particularly medical works of Korean authorship. Although there is little evidence of Japanese engagement with Korean vernacular writings, Korean writings in Chinese were frequently reprinted in Japan and these reprints are evidence of the esteem Korean texts enjoyed in Japan during the Edo period. (shrink)

The contribution of Jesuits to the different fields of knowledge, including philosophy, is historically well known. In fact, since the foundation of the Society of Jesus, in the 16th century, Jesuits from different generations and cultures have taken part in the philosophical debates of their time and their different contexts. Since the foundation of the Society of Jesus, in 1540, the Jesuits, individually and as a body, have engaged in a fruitful dialogue between the Christian tradition and different dimensions of (...) human culture. During almost five centuries, numerous Jesuits taught philosophy in academic institutions all over the world. Some of them have their names recorded in the history of philosophy. Of course, the majority of them is not anymore remembered, despite their valuable contribution to the development of the Jesuit intellectual tradition up to our times. In fact, as an heir of the Roman College, the first academic institution founded by the Society of Jesus, in 1551, the Pontifical Gregorian University, in Rome, is a witness to this tradition, which has been kept alive thanks to the discrete work of both Jesuits and lay intellectuals. Known as the University of the Nations, this institution corroborates not only the capacity of the Jesuit tradition to put faith in dialogue with reason, but also the option to take the concrete reality of each human culture and its historical context as its point of departure. The Jesuits’ willingness to engage in dialogue with different intellectual perspectives is underpinned by one of the most defining traits of the Jesuit charism, namely, the conviction that God can be found and served in all things. Accordingly, Jesuits have adopted, from the beginning, an amenable stance towards the world with its different cultures and intellectual trends. As such, Jesuits have, since the beginning, inhabited the frontiers of human thought. According to the contemporary philosopher Paul Gilbert, SJ, within the institutions under the leadership of the Society of Jesus, it was always possible to maintain an equilibrium between two principles: “intellectual unity” and “openness to the world.” Without detriment to the Jesuit identity, the companions of Ignatius have been willing to dwell in the various dimensions of human reality, in their multiplicity and plurality. Either in the renewal of Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ metaphysics, or in the dialogue with modern philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, or Hegel, and even in the inculturation in non-European contexts, the Jesuits have been able to preserve the Christian tradition through an original development of human culture in all its richness and diversity. With respect to the last century, it has to be acknowledged that a significant number of Jesuits made significant contributions, with recognized competence, to philosophy. Certainly, the 20th century was particularly complex in many respects. It would be enough to recall that this period, which brought with it unprecedented social, scientific, and technological developments, was also the stage for the two World Wars. With the emergence or consolidation of philosophical currents such as Marxism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Structuralism, and Post-Modernism, the past century was, without any doubt, fascinating from the intellectual point of view. Jesuits such as Karl Rahner, Frederick Copleston, Bernard Lonergan, William Norris Clarke, John F. Kavanaugh, Teilhard de Chardin, Gaston Fessard, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, Michel de Certeau, Xavier Tilliette, Paul Valadier, Paweł Siwek, Ignacio Ellacuría, Francisco Taborda, Henrique de Lima Vaz and, in the Portuguese context, Diamantino Martins or Júlio Fragata, among many others, were able to engage different philosophical currents, problems and controversies of their times. Faithful to their long tradition of being present in the frontiers of thought, those Jesuits have engaged in a fruitful dialogue with these intellectual trends, offering relevant contributions to different ongoing debates. Within this context, the present volume recalls and discusses the philosophical contribution of some of the most prominent Jesuit protagonists of the intellectual interchange that took place in the 20th century. This volume also intends to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, which happens just before the inauguration of the Ignatian Year. Decreed by Father Arturo Sosa, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, this celebratory Year will start on May 20, 2021, precisely 500 years after Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, was wounded at the battle of Pamplona. We are happy that this volume could bring together outstanding specialists in the thought of some of the most prominent Jesuits philosophers of the last century, namely Paul Valadier, Paul Gilbert, Józef Bremer, Jacek Poznański, Alexander Maar, Patrick H. Byrne, M. Ross Romero, Carlos Alvarez, Hélio Pereira Lima, José Gama, Domingos Terra, Gabriel Flynn, Marie-Gabrielle Lemaire, José Sols Lucia, Lorena Zuchel Lovera, Pedro Pablo Achondo Moya, Enzo Solari, Massimo Borghesi, Mendo Castro Henriques, João Barbosa, and Dominique Lambert. In addition, in the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Júlio Fragata’s birth, Maria Teresa Fragata presents a memory of his life and thought. We hope that this volume may be useful to all those interested in the Jesuit philosophical tradition. Hopefully, it will stimulate scholars to pursue a fruitful and creative dialogue with contemporary philosophy, in the footsteps of the Jesuit philosophers featured here. We would like to thank all the authors and all those who, in different ways, made this volume possible. (shrink)

Denis Diderot’s ideas about war and peace crystalize many of the contradictions in the world that he identified. On the one hand, war is a natural product of contradictions between natural law and human developments. On the other hand, it can and should always be subject to moral judgment based on a wide-ranging knowledge of history and context. War can be good if it eliminates tyranny, and bad if it limits freedom, equality, and prosperity. Peace can be good if it (...) cultivates the latter, and bad if it freezes inequality. Diderot never allows himself to rest on universal judgments for all times and all places, but insists upon never-ending comparisons and contrasts between the moral world and the natural world. Philosophical materialism provides the basis for his understanding of the world, but morals provide the instruments of judgment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:So Close and Other EssaysOn Hélène Cixous’s writingJoana Masóce n’est jamaispar l’intérieurni par le centreque je passe—Antonin Artaud, Cahiers d’Ivry, (1947–1948)At the end of the sixteenth century, the genre of the essay transformed the relationship between the subject and object of writing, since the essay emerged as a reaction against other literary forms—such as the commentary, the gloss or the treatise—in which the object of study is not (...) problematized. The gloss, the commentary, or the treatise deal with disciplines or thematic topics—astronomy, agronomy, theology, physics, history—in the proper sense, whereas the essay tends to focus on the approach to those issues. To put it differently, the essay is not strictly concerned with these issues or topics in themselves, but with the approach to them by means of writing.With Michel de Montaigne, specifically in his Essays published between 1580 and 1595, we are faced with writing where the knowledge of the object is no longer the sole center of the text. Despite being actually concerned with the Greek philosophical tradition, sixteenth-century religious wars, and, among many other topics, European colonialism in America, Montaigne’s Essays try to contest the privilege of the object, the privilege of the referent of writing, in [End Page 131] favor of its subject: the subject of writing and the writing itself, what we call in French une écriture de soi.As is well known, in his Essays Montaigne’s writing conveys neither message nor knowledge regarding things and topics, but what he calls “la continuelle mutation et branle” des êtres [“nostre estre”] et des objects [“ des objects”]: “the continual and perpetual mutation” of “beings” and “objects” (257).This epistemological crisis of the essay—abandoning the privilege of the object or theme for an emphasis on questioning the subject of writing and the modalities of the approach to the object—is explicit in the etymology of the word essay. Beyond the notion of attempt—in French, essayer means “to try,” “to attempt to do something”—essayer, from the Latin verb ex-agere, is a compound word of the verb agere, “to act,” in French agir. In Latin, the meaning of agere—“to act”—differs from facere, as agir does in French from faire, “to do”; it is in this way that these two verbs designate a different relationship between the subject and the object of the action. Although agere and facere both refer to action, the verb agere at the origin of the word essay designates an action accomplished by a subject, whereas facere is a transitive verb whose emphasis is placed on the object.While, on the one hand, facere is to be read in the register of transitivity—as is explicit in the following Latin phrases: facere litteram, “to write a letter,” or facere furtum, “to commit theft”—on the other hand, agere, although a transitive verb in Latin, underscores and anticipates the kind of intransitivity of action we will later find in Roman languages. In these Latin phrases, one can see that in Latin, at the same time that, the syntactic construction of agere requires an object, this object is not, strictly speaking, the real object produced by the verb, because in the phrases agere vitam, agere aetatem, or agere aevum, “to spend time or to live,” time is not the real object produced by the verb “to spend.” In Latin, “life,” vitam, “age,” aetatem, or “lifetime,” aevum, are not the real objects produced by the verb agere. This perhaps explains the evolution of the verb in French, or in English, where “to act” and agir have become intransitive verbs, reinforcing the idea that the essay appears to be a genre where whatever has to be done or said is not simply presented as an object.Moreover, instead of the conclusive verb facere, which designates the action as a result or an achievement—the letter is already written, or the theft is already commited—the temporality of agere, in Latin, is a durative one, as in the phrases agere vitam, aetatem, or aevum, “to live.” By its emphasis, not on the object... (shrink)

Peace literacy shows why public philosophy and activism for peace and justice are better together while providing a practical framework designed to make the collaboration stronger and more effective. In this chapter, the authors begin with an overview of peace literacy and then show how it operates as an effective lens through which to read the strengths of various approaches to public philosophy and activism for peace and justice, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and into the contemporary period. (...) Then, they turn to the development of peace literacy themes as we find them in the work of philosophers dedicated to publicly engaged activism for peace and justice, especially in American movements for the abolition of chattel slavery, anti‐war and nonviolence, and civil rights. (shrink)