Manusia dan budaya

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Olivier Clément

When the author of the widely-acclaimed Roots of Christian Mysticism thinks about human nature, its challenges, problems, joys and fulfillment, he does so with originality. At the same time, his thought is rooted in the experience of the early Christian centuries. The result is a book that sees humanity in fundamentally spiritual terms. Clement begins by exploring a response to the dysfunctional aspects of nature, and then looks at how we are persons made in the image of the divine and in communion with one another; in the light of what emerges, the author discovers fresh understandings of sexuality, politics, the role of humanity in the cosmos and the power of beauty; his discussion ends with facing our society's unmentionable question: death.

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James Choung

James Choung narrates this imaginative dialogue between three young friends attempting to come to terms with Christianity's loss of cultural capital, tectonic shifts in spiritual temperament from one generation to the next and the persisting feeling of God summoning them to an embodied faith despite everything.

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Lars Thunberg

One of the outstanding Christian thinkers of all time, Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580-662) exerted a powerful formative influence on the Church when it was still one and undivided. Maximus left his stamp on Christianity as it is now recognized by all three broad streams of Christian faith: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. Yet for centuries the detailed study of Maximus's writings was neglected. The first edition of Thunberg's Microcosm and Mediator (1965) helped to transform this situation of indifference into one of intense interest in Maximus and the subtleties of his thinking. This new edition has been revised and expanded, with updated references and bibliographies. The focus of Microcosm and Mediator is Maximus's anthropology, his highly developed general reflections on human nature. Maximus understands man as, not only a being - a microcosm - who reflects the constitution of the created universe, but also as a being - a mediator - created in the image of God, whose task it is, in Christ, to reconcile the spiritual and the sensible into one homogeneous unity.

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Lionel M. Jensen

Could it be that the familiar and beloved figure of Confucius was invented by Jesuit priests? In Manufacturing Confucianism, Lionel M. Jensen reveals this very fact, demonstrating how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western missionaries used translations of the ancient ru tradition to invent the presumably historical figure who has since been globally celebrated as philosopher, prophet, statesman, wise man, and saint. Challenging both previous scholarship and widespread belief, Jensen uses European letters and memoirs, Christian histories and catechisms written in Chinese, translations and commentaries on the Sishu, and a Latin summary of Chinese culture known as the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus to argue that the national self-consciousness of Europe and China was bred from a cultural ecumenism wherein both were equal contributors.