Is the Confucian tradition compatible with the Western understanding of human rights? Are there fundamental human values, regardless of cultural differences, common to all peoples of all nations? At this critical point in Communist China's history, eighteen distinguished scholars address the role of Confucianism in dealing with questions of universal human rights.

Is the Confucian tradition compatible with the Western understanding of human rights? Are there fundamental human values, regardless of cultural differences, common to all peoples of all nations? At this critical point in Communist China's history, eighteen distinguished scholars address the role of Confucianism in dealing with questions of universal human rights.

This article brings Leo Strauss’s “Persecution and the Art of Writing” thesis to bear on the crisis of independent thinking in modern Chinese intellectual history. It argues that while heterodox Chinese thinkers frequently practiced “writing between the lines” to evade censorship, conformist minds were equally adept at utilizing the charm of the clandestine—deception, fabrication, and self-mythologization—for their own agendas. To illustrate the peculiar tension between conformity and dissent, I focus on two Chinese thinkers who exploited esotericism at crucial junctures of (...) The People’s Republic of China’s history: Liu Xiaofeng (劉小楓, 1956–), a conservative theologian who spawned a Chinese Straussian School to preach antiliberal doctrines in contemporary China; and Chen Yinke (陳寅恪, 1890–1960), a cultural traditionalist who resisted Marxist doctrines throughout the Mao era. Both Liu and Chen conceived of the public as a hostile and conformist crowd and deliberately developed special techniques of writing that contain multiple levels of significance—Liu named his variant “subtle words with profound meaning” (微言大義) while Chen called his “inner history from the heart” (心史). Though formally similar, these two approaches took Strauss’s thesis in drastically different directions: while Chen deployed a rhetorical smoke screen of obscure references to tease the censor, Chinese Straussians wielded double teaching to conceal the conformism of their politics from the public. (shrink)

This book offers a new paradigm for religious pluralism by exploring Indic insights of Jainism and the nature of paradox.

Introduction: Christian moral action -- Stanley Hauerwas -- Reinhard Hütter -- Common threads -- Thomas Aquinas -- Toward an ecumenical ethic of grace -- Conclusion: A community-centered ecumenical ethic of grace.

Narrative theology views the truths of scripture through an iconographic lens to indicate God's intimate involvement in human life. However, when narrative theology becomes "narrative theological ethics," the transformative power of narrative about God receives more emphasis than the power of God itself. Narrative theology quickly moves toward linguistic idolatry when God's grace is valued merely as an important facet of a powerful narrative rather than as the foundation of Christian moral action.

Writing an accessible introduction to process theology is no easy task. As Roland Faber notes, “Process theology is a quite complex phenomenon”. Yet this is the task he sets out for himself in The Becoming of God: Process Theology, Philosophy, and Multireligious Engagement. While Faber describes his book as an introduction to process theology, it would perhaps be better described as an introduction to the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and its theological implications.In typical Faber fashion, this poetic introduction to (...) Whitehead is thorough, complex, and insightful. Ranging across issues of science, religious studies, theology, and philosophy, Faber tackles some of the most complicated thought problems... (shrink)

In this paper the quantum covariant relativistic dynamics of many bodies is reconsidered. It is emphasized that this is an event dynamics. The events are quantum statistically correlated by the global parameter τ. The derivation of an event Boltzmann equation emphasizes this. It is shown that this Boltzmann equation may be viewed as exact in a dilute event limit ignoring three event correlations. A quantum entropy principle is obtained for the marginal Wigner distribution function. By means of event linking (concatenations) (...) particle properties such as the equation of state may be obtained. We further reconsider the generalized quantum equilibrium ensemble theory and the free event case of the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein distributions, and some consequences. The ultra-relativistic limit differs from the non-covariant theory and is a test of this point of view. (shrink)