Kaebyŏk

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-53
Author(s):  
Don Baker ◽  
Seok Heo ◽  

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Korea’s new religions is an expectation of kaebyŏk, a “Great Transformation” which will eliminate the many conflicts human beings are facing today and produce a world in human beings will find themselves instead in cooperative and mutually beneficial relationships with both their fellow human beings and the natural world. Kaebyŏk once referred to the creation of the world. The use of kaebyŏk in Korea to mean “re-creation” first appeared in the teachings of Ch’oe Cheu, the founder of Tonghak. It was reiterated by Kim Hang, the author of Correct Changes. Kang Ilsun, revered by the Chŭngsan family of religions, further elaborated on the reasons kaebyŏk is imminent and how we can hasten its arrival. Park Chungbin, the founder of Won Buddhism, then suggested that kaebyŏk of the material world was already happening and proposed steps we should take to ensure that we keep pace spiritually. These four Korean religious leaders stimulated an important shift in the Korean world-view which has influenced not only followers of Korea’s new religions but the spirituality of Koreans in general.

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.


1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 273-304
Author(s):  
Jane Williams-Hogan

In this paper, the author examines the issue of charisma and prophecy in secularized societies. In traditional society the charismatic personality or the prophet brought a universalizing and rationalizing message which simultaneously expanded and penetrated the sphere of external order in the world, giving people the ability to manipulate and control the natural world. The disenchanted world is the end product of this process, when no more mysterious forces come into play, and when one can in principle master all things through rational calculation. The gift of rationality almost randomly bestowed in the ancient world becomes, for Weber, the rightful inheritance of the modern individual. Clarity brought by charisma in a dark and foreboding world loses its brilliance and its ability to beckon when the world is filled with light. In investigating charisma in only traditional societies, Weber saw charisma as one dimensional, solely as the force of rationality. So envisioned, charisma dissipates in the very act of realizing itself through the transformation of the world. Given Weber's analysis, therefore, one would not expect to find genuinely new religions emerging within our transformed and rational modern society. In the examination of the founding something that is best identified by the sociological term charisma, though obviously in modern guise, is clearly evident. This points to the possibility that charisma is not static but has the dynamic capacity to be responsive to the structural characteristics of the society in which it operates.


Author(s):  
Damien Keown

Is Buddhism truly an ‘eco-friendly’ religion? ‘Animals and the environment’ examines the implications of Buddhist teachings such as that human beings can be reborn as animals and vice versa. While the Buddhist ‘sublime attitudes’ such as kindness and compassion seem at first to favour animals to a greater degree than we find in Christianity, human life still takes precedence in the hierarchy of living beings. Rules about plant life are unclear, with Buddhist writers acknowledging the beauty of both the wilderness and civilization. Vegetarianism is largely seen as a morally superior diet, but meat-eating was common at the time of the Buddha and is widely practised by monks today. Buddhist attitudes toward the natural world are complex and are to some extent overshadowed by the belief that the world as we know it is fundamentally flawed.


1989 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-40
Author(s):  
Lawrence Moser

Language is a way of communicating between people by the use of symbols, signs, writing and oral speech. Language is used in different ways in different communities, countries and cultures throughout the world. Lindfors (1980, p.43) suggests that language consists of three major components: Semantic, Syntatic and Phonological.Language is seen as being acquired by human beings through their own interaction with the environment that surrounds them. Human beings are able to build an overview of their language through personal experience, and also a cognitive structure developed from their world view.


1960 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 424-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
George L. Mosse

The relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment presents a subtle and difficult problem. No historian has as yet fully answered the important question of how the world view of the eighteenth century is related to that of traditional Christianity. It is certain, however, that the deism of that century rejected traditional Christianity as superstitious and denied Christianity a monopoly upon religious truth. The many formal parallels which can be drawn between Enlightenment and Christianity cannot obscure this fact. From the point of view of historical Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, the faith of the Enlightenment was blasphemy. It did away with a personal God, it admitted no supernatural above the natural, it denied the relevance of Christ's redemptive task in this world. This essay attempts to discover whether traditional Christian thought itself did not make a contribution to the Enlightenment.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Powell

At the end of World War II, Japan, as well as the rest of the world, was thrust into a new age of unbelievably destructive possibilities: the first use of nuclear weapons against human beings. Not only could such a bomb flatten an entire city, it could do so in only an instant. The poorly understood scars that were left showed a new level of war that the world needs to come to terms with. By considering the many medical effects of the atomic bomb on the victims of Hiroshima City, which encompasses the initial blast, radiation, and traumatic effects, we can gain a better understanding of the terrible costs of human health in nuclear war.


2020 ◽  
pp. 56-64
Author(s):  
Rachael Floom ◽  
Melanie Janzen

Imagine a world full of human beings existing to and for themselves alone, insensitive and removed from the social and natural world. Here we contemplate child-centeredness, a discourse used liberally in the realm of early childhood education and yet rarely considered critically. Drawing from Gert Biesta, we will explore the ways in which the notion of a child-centred curriculum positions the child as an egological being and thus minimizes the child’s relationships with others and the world in which they exist. We hope to provoke considerations of how we might reconceptualize curricula to foster children’s understanding of their broader existence.


2000 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Roger Fellows

Oscar Wilde remarked in The Picture of Dorian Gray that, ‘It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Over three centuries of natural science show that, at least as far as the study of the natural world is concerned, Wilde's epigram is itself shallow. Weber used the term ‘disenchantment’ to mean the elimination of magic from the modern scientific world view: the intellectual rationalisation of the world embodied in modern science has made it impossible to believe in magic or an invisible God or gods, without a ‘sacrifice of the intellect’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-371
Author(s):  
Turan Özgür Güngör

These days environmental issues are among the most commonly reported ones in the world. The dangerous effects of the environmental problems, which are as old as the history of humanity, began to be felt more profoundly after the Industrial Revolution. In former times the environmental problems were felt only at a local level with the destruction of forests in order to facilitate hunting places and clear lands for farming areas. After the Industrial Revolution the extent of the problem rose and reached the catastrophic disaster level with the extensive fossil fuel use. Nowadays, when environment problems come into question, many people prefer using the term environmental disaster in place of the term environmental problems. This term, environmental disaster, may be remarkable enough to discern the severity of the problem.  The role of literature in reaching the public cannot be denied. Ecocriticism tries to make use of this ability of literature in setting forth and expressing environment problems. Since both fictional and non-fictional literature can reach many people, the works which concern with the environmental problems may be beneficial to raise awareness and contribute to inform many people all over the world about the severity of these problems. Creating awareness is an important issue since many people are not aware of the fact that the nature is destroyed by humans, and they neglect that the harm to nature causes the harm to humanity concurrently since there has always been an indissoluble bond between ecosystem and humans. Humans cannot be dissociated from the natural world. In this study, some brief information about human related environment disasters, social organizations which were established to fight for the rights of nonhuman beings in nature, the function of literature in creating awareness among human beings, the efforts of creating ecological reading and the emergence of ecocritical literary criticism will be given. After discussing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s contribution to nature writing and Romanticism briefly, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” will be evaluated from an ecocritical perspective.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Piotr Skubała ◽  

Climate change caused by excessive emissions of greenhouse gases is becoming, along with excessive exploitation of the environment, agriculture and urbani-zation, one of the main threats to life on Earth and our civilization. Although we have known about the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and the rise of the average temperature on Earth since end of the 20th century, it was only after nearly 100 years that we took international action to reduce this phenomenon. We are looking at the closing window and the question arises whether we will be able to react and stave oȮ the climate crisis. We know what immediate actions are needed, but we do not take them. It seems that a neces-sary condition for doing the work of repairing the world is a complete change in the way we view the natural world. It must be based on relational thinking, emphasize mutual relationships, the interdependence of man and nature, hu-man beings and non-human beings.


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