“A European community grounded only in political and economic cooperation of the member states would lack an intrinsic common bond. It would be built upon sand.”—Klaus Held The above quote is lifted from a brilliant essay published in the Fall of 2002 by Klaus Held titled, “The Origins of Europe with the Greek Discovery of…
Continuation from Part II. Indeed, the journey into self-knowledge is integral part of our essential humanity, and not only as individual human beings, but also as people, nations and even entire civilizations and as humankind as a whole. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm but the contrary is also true. This can only be so if…
Continued from Part I. All of these essays issued out of a series of reflections. Some were at first jutted down as diary entries, others became articles of various length, and several of them became full length essays (such as the very first one or the 14th on the Janus-like face of Europe), still others…
At the turn of the new millennium I joined the online dialogue and debate on “The Future of the European Union.” It was inaugurated by Tony Blair and the then President of the EU Council Romano Prodi. They invited all Europhiles to participate with their own contributions and ideas and thus further the democratic spirit…
Continued from Christianity and Europe: Tony Blair’s View at Yale University – Part II The 25 students who took the course co-taught by Blair (chosen from 270 who applied; a microcosm of globalization from various cultures and faiths) describe his teaching method as Socratic; one of probing questions and tentative answers. He has discarded the…
Continued from Christianity and Europe: Tony Blair’s View at Yale University – Part I What all this activity amounts to is an initial giving voice to a belief that faith can and in fact should have a role in public decisions. This, in a country mind you, and in a culture—modern Western culture—which keeps religion…
In 1996, the year before he became prime minister, Tony Blair published a collection of his speeches and articles under the title New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. In that book Blair inserts the history of Britain within the larger context of the history of Christianity and very much in the tradition of…
“…the place to look for hope is not just to the postcolonial novel—which has struggled to achieve the insights of Ouologuem or Midimbe—but to all-consuming vision of this less-anxious creativity. It matters little who it was made for; what we should learn from is the imagination that produced it. Man with a Bicycle is produced…
Part I “African art has been maligned in the writings of Western scholars who have failed to understand its source and origin… In private collections, African artworks become transfixed on the mantelpiece in wooden cubicles, bathed in a caressing interplay of lights, but with very little or no reference—suggested or amplified—to their contextual use of…
The Pope points out that one such modern ideology is liberation theology which in Latin America ended up substituting the Christian idea of redemption. The relation of personal responsibility to sin and redemption was shifted to the relation between social structures and redemption. The approach is now not that of conversion of the heart but…