Opening Symposium: Religions and Dialogue among
Civilizations
[24 March, Thu., 13:30-17:30]
Toward a Dialogical Civilization
Religious Leaders as Public Intellectuals
TU Weiming
(Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute, USA)
| Outline The idea of a "public intellectual" does not seem to have any antecedent in the Hindu, Buddhist, Judaic, Greek, Christian, or Islamic traditions. Yet, although the traditional guru, monk, rabbi, philosopher, priest, or mullah is not the functional equivalent of a modern intellectual, each of them, perhaps inadvertently, assumes the responsibility of a public intellectual. A lofty aspiration of the public intellectual — politically concerned, socially engaged, and culturally sensitive—is world citizenship. In our globalizing age, the cultivation of world citizenship is predicated on the emergence of a dialogical civilization. Such a civilization is humanistic and spiritual. It is rooted in earth, body, and community, but transcends egoism, parochialism, ethnocentrism, and anthropocentrism. Its spirit is embedded in ordinary human existence and, at the same time, oriented toward an ever-expanding horizon of anthropocosmic inter-relatedness. An underlying assumption of a dialogical civilization is the sanctity of the earth: the secular is sacred and worldly affairs are essentially spiritual. To the religious leaders as public intellectuals, the "Pure Land" or the "Kingdom of God" is profoundly humanistic. They cherish the idea that the ultimate meaning of life is realizable in the world here and now. Indeed, all Axial-Age civilizations have undergone fundamental transformations in response to the crises of humanity. Virtually all religious leaders take seriously environmental degradation, abject poverty, social disintegration, terrorism, violence, crime, or drugs as their urgent concerns. A defining characteristic of religion is its avowed compassion and love for humanity; thus, all forms of suffering, from brutal torture to routine boredom, are challenges to religious leadership. Religious leaders as public intellectuals are seasoned in two languages. One language, essential for internal solidarity and communication, they share with members of their faith community. The other is the language of world citizenship, a language essential to the well-being of a dialogical civilization. Implicit in this bilingualism is the necessity and desirability of a joint effort to cultivate inter-religious communication at all levels-theology, symbols, meditation, prayer, worship, rituals, and practices. Bilingualism can enhance the self-awareness of one's mother tongue. The envisioned dialogical civilization is not a melting pot but the confluence of renewed religious traditions and invigorated faith communities. This "unity in diversity" or "harmony without uniformity" is vitally important for human survival and flourishing.
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TU
WEIMING is Harvard-Yenching Professor of Chinese History and
Philosophy and of Confucian Studies at Harvard University and Director
of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Previously he taught at Princeton
University and the University of California at Berkeley. | Prof. Susumu Shimazono, President of the JARS Congress
Secretariat of the 19th World Congress of IAHR Department of Religious Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo 7-3-1, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan 113-0033 TEL: (81)3-5841-3765@ FAX: (81)3-5841-3888 E-mail address: iahr@l.u-tokyo.ac.jp Congress website: http://www.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/iahr2005/ |