The Consorts of King Wu and King Wen in the Bronze Inscriptions of Early Chou

Abstract

Daodejing is an essential text in Chinese culture. The number of its English translations exceeds a total of 112 editions. The first one was produced by John Chalmers, who was a Scottish missionary from London Missionary Society stationed in Hong Kong and Canton for a long period of time. Chalmers's close missionary colleague, James Legge, who was subsequently the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford, produced another translation. This paper aims at revealing the socio-cultural and intellectual processes behind the making of these two translations. In so doing, it discusses the differences in the two texts and explores the reasons for their differences.

Christian missionaries in China were the agents for the cultural interactions between China and the West. Not only did they bring the Christian message to China, but they also introduced the Chinese ideas through their translations and writings to their Western audience. This should be a fruitful and important topic for serious scholarship in both the studies in Sinology and in the history of translation.     

“I think that would be the end of Canada”: Howard Green,the Nuclear Test Ban,and Interest-Based Foreign Policy, 1946–1963

Canada's atomic arms debate has attracted considerable scholarship, yet one of the debate's chief protagonists, Canada's Secretary of State for External Affairs Howard Green, has received comparatively little attention. In the fall of 1959 Green abruptly moved against further nuclear testing, and began a crusade against Canadian acquisition of atomic weapons. By exploring Howard Green's understanding of nuclear fallout and subsequent actions regarding nuclear testing, this article examines the validity of existing explanations for Green's abrupt change of heart and proposes a new primary motivation: that advancements in science's understanding of the environmental impact of nuclear fallout led Green to redraw his “mental map” of Canada's interests.     

‘Heritage talks. Heritage calls’: some instances of the canonisation policy of John Paul II in Italy

During his long pontificate, John Paul II pursued a wide and carefully articulated policy of canonisations whose aim was to underwrite his magisterium by presenting hagiographical models that would convey well-defined pastoral teaching and contain both ecclesiastical and ecclesiological messages for the faithful. The high number of Italians declared blessed and/or made saints analysed in the present article is proof of the special interest the Pope showed in Italy and specifically in the sanctity of the country. The high concentration of beatifications and canonisations of hagiographical figures from Italy can be explained only in part by the canonical system, which regulates the process of canonisation and which makes it easier to open and support a cause, above all from a financial point of view, if the pressure group behind the candidate for sainthood is located near the Vatican. More precisely, what emerges is both the attempt to create a specific public image of Italy as a nation which has been a historic stronghold of Catholicism and is still capable of reacting to secularisation, and the objective of laying down more effective guidelines and robust directives for civil society. In other words, by proposing Italian hagiographical models, John Paul II was striving to mould Italy's national identity in a Christian form, conferring on the country the role of model for other European states.     

Ruinismo: the Catholic Church in Italy from ‘mediation culture’ to the Cultural Project

It is only seven years since Monsignor Camillo Ruini resigned from his role as President of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), yet it feels much longer. The tempestuous events that marked Silvio Berlusconi's decline, on one hand, and the election of Pope Francis to the Holy See, on the other, have made such an impression on recent Italian history that seems to leave no time for reflection on what has happened over the last twenty years. This article explores how, during this time, Cardinal Ruini has re-fashioned the relations between the Catholic Church and Italian politics, following a pattern that has come to be known as ‘ruinismo’. The essay follows the development of the theological-political line of the Conference, from the “mediation” of the “Catholic Party”, the Christian Democrats (DC), to the “policy of presence” of politically committed Catholics, defined in these terms by the ecclesiastical congress in Loreto in 1985 and fully carried out under Ruini's management, with the backing of Berlusconi's governments. The aim is to establish whether and to what extent the “Ruinian” rule may be regarded as the consequence of mainstream Catholic politics of the 1980s and, equally, as a response to the cultural and political transformation brought about by the upheavals of the corruption scandals of 1989–91. Only from this long-term perspective is it possible to determine whether Ruini's exit has brought an end to ruinismo.     

John Maynard Keynes,the Bloomsbury group and the origins of the arts council movement

The article examines the origins of the arts council movement in the ideas of the Bloomsbury Group and John Maynard Keynes. The Bloomsbury Groups' sense of experimentation and flexibility, their willingness to take action to create new institutions, and their distrust of bureaucracy, influenced Keynes's development of a new model for state patronage of the arts in 1946. He took an organization established during the Second World War to employ artists and organize morale‐boosting tours of the performing and visual arts, and oversaw its development into the Arts Council of Great Britain, the first such arts council. His model – making grants of public funds through semi‐autonomous government bodies to private individuals and privately operated arts institutions – became a standard form of public funding for the arts by the end of the twentieth century in many countries around the world.     

The Modern Revolution and the Collapse of Moral Analogy: Tocqueville and Guizot

Abstract

I locate the Leveller John Lilburne within the broader literature on the history of political thought and I challenge scholars who associate Lilburne's Leveller political thought with Hobbesian liberty, with proto-libertarianism, or with proto-bourgeois political thought. I advance an understanding of Lilburne as creatively merging central tenets of proto-liberalism with central tenets of republicanism. To develop this amalgamation of ideas, I go considerably beyond the Agreement of the People and the Putney Debates to explore the larger Leveller corpus. Through this investigation I articulate Lilburne's account of key concepts in the history of political thought including: liberty, tyranny, rights, rule, political participation, popular sovereignty, civic virtue, self-interest, harmony, antagonism, and institutional design. I conclude by arguing that we should consider the Levellers, particularly John Lilburne, as offering an early example of what has come to be called liberal-republican political thought, a way of theorizing found within the writings of English Commonwealthsmen.     

The Locke Essay: Achievement and Promise

Abstract

Strauss's essay on Locke is devoted to Locke's early lectures on the law of nature, a text unpublished when he initially wrote on Locke in Natural Right and History. One purpose of his essay was to show that the Locke text did not contradict the position on the law of nature that Strauss had earlier attributed to him. Strauss also used the essay as an opportunity to further his own reflections on traditional natural law doctrine.     

A Nation with the Church’s Soul

Abstract

This essay considers Barack Obama’s invocation of Reinhold Niebuhr to oppose the Iraq War and Richard John Neuhaus’s support for the war. I argue that although Niebuhr and Neuhaus might have disagreed over the Iraq War, there is a more substantive agreement between the two figures over the role, or lack thereof, of the church in the public square. I argue that a weak ecclesiology in both impedes the Church’s ability to be a prophetic voice in the face of injustice.     

A Critique of the Metaphysics of Ontological Poesis : Responding to Theology and the Political

Abstract

A common set of metaphysical assumptions inform the theological proposals of many contributors to Theology and the Political: The New Debate. Those assumptions are orientated toward grounding the possibility of genuine ontological creativity (poesis) in a particular construal of nature's mediation of the supernatural. Applying the claims of Bernard Lonergan's early work on grace and freedom to those assumptions, the argument is made that this position repeats the most fundamental flaws of the Bañezian position in the de Auxiliis controversy: namely, a basic confusion of form with act, which gives rise to the misguided assumption that a "third" (i.e., physical premotion, causal influx, sophia) must be posited to mediate divine grace to the world and within it. It is argued that this confusion reveals that a competitive understanding of the God/world relation is presumed in this proposal, which itself is the result of a failure to affirm the absolute and immediate dependence implied by the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.     

Impatience: On Derrida,Milbank and the Decision

Abstract

Derrida has long served as a foil, in the work of John Milbank, and represented the neo-pagan nature of much contemporary philosophy. He appeared in Theology and Social Theory as one of the heirs of Nietzsche, politically justifying and ritualizing violence. In the Vico books, Derrida appears again, contrasted with Vico's ability to imbue language not only with constituting power, but with a teleologically oriented realism. This theme is expanded in subsequent works, where Milbank makes Christological and Trinitarian studies of linguistic difference, and accuses Derrida's thought of degenerating into nihilism. Nonetheless, Milbank and Derrida are disturbed by a similar problem. There is, for both, an irrational moment at the foundations of political life that calls out for a decision. For Derrida this decision institutes the whole order of meaning, undergirded by the quasi-transcendental structure of writing. According to Milbank, this renders all content arbitrary, leaving Derrida unable to imagine a genuinely meaningful world. Milbank argues, instead, that the important decision is whether or not one will see the content of experience as meaningful or meaningless. Derrida's denial of meaning, which is also a denial of God, is ungrounded. One ought, instead, see the world as the image of God.