Oskar Gruenwald

This essay proposes that while a "Christian" democracy may be too idealistic, liberal democracy presupposes transcendent moral and spiritual norms, in particular a Judeo-Christian foundation for human dignity and human rights. A Biblical understanding of human nature as fallible and imperfect susceptible to worldly temptations, emphasizes free choice and personal responsibility, and the imperative to limit the temporal exercise of power by any man or institution. Maritain's concept of integral or Christian humanism is founded on personalism, the unique value and dignity of each human being created in the image of God, and the need for community. The major challenge for literal democracy is how to reconcile individual freedom with socio-economic-political-legal institutions and processes which require the constraint of man-made laws and the exercise of authority and power The essay condudes that perhaps the major legacy of the American founding is the notion of the priority of liberty which offers the best prospects for conjoining reason and faith, the secular and the sacred, Athens and Jerusalem, The priority of liberty also animates Maritain's vision of a "Christianly-inspired" personalistic society capable of advancing both individual human flourishing and the common good.

This essay proposes that the human quest for meaning, self-realization, and self-transcendence via the moral "ought" as the proper end, purpose, or goal for man constitutes the teleological imperative. This pan-human quest for universal touchstones for values and truths should thus be the focus of both moral education and cultural renewal. Central to this quest is a re-conceptualization of virtue ethics as radically transcending the social construction of reality. Virtue may he fully understood only within the larger parameters of natural right or natural law, which posit an underlying moral order in Creation, independently of and preceding, human perception and cognition. The right ordering of the human soul or self reflects the larger cosmological order of the universe, and its fulfillment in the Golden Rule or the Tao, the Judeo-Christian traditions expressed in the Decalogue, and the New Testament's call for charity.

This essay explores a new conceptual paradigm for bridging the gulf separating what C. P. Snow called The Two Cultures--science and the humanities. Central to this rainbow paradigm is a more unified, holistic, and integral understanding of human life in society. A fruitful science-theology dialogue presupposes a much broader context of a revitalized Third Culture which weaves together insights from all the arts and sciences, social sciences and humanities. The essay thus invokes the incarnational dimension of man as God's creation and truth as the Logos or ultimate Reality. The conclusion follows that a new lingua franca--a more felicitous conceptual understanding focusing on man as the missing link-requires integrative insights across all disciplines. Such an integral vision of what it means to be fully human reflects a sapiential, existential, and eschatological challenge of unity in diversity, that is, a truly human culture or a culture of cultures.

This essay explores an interdisciplinary framework for the comparative study of genocide. It traces the Other Holocaust of communist genocide in the twentieth century, with an estimated 100 million victims. Both the Nazi Holocaust and communist genocide raise major ethical dilemmas concerning individual and collective responsibility. The central underlying dynamic common to the Nazi Holocaust, communist and other genocides is the radical discounting of human life and dignity, and denial of the intrinstic worth of each individual human being. Hence the moral equivalency of evil Mass crimes against humanity run counter to the ethical precepts of all major religions, in particular the Judaeo-Christian tradition which considers man inviolable, created in the image of God Those who would honor and remember the victims of past genocides, whether Christians or Jews, believers or nonbelievers, need to rededicate their efforts to prevent such atrocities in the future by defending human rights and the persecuted in the present.

This essay offers hope that beyond the specter and tragedy of the Yugoslav civil war lie the prospects for peace, democratization, economic and political reconstruction, and the evolution of a democratic Third Yugoslavia. But, to realize this hope, there is a need for the development of a genuine civic culture and civil society in the Yugoslav successor states based on democratic values, pluralism, and tolerance, rooted in the conception of universal human rights, constitutionalism, and equality before the law. The South Slavs may have to retrieve their historical memory which predates the fateful divisions along ethnic, cultural, and religious lines. The Swiss model of autonomous cantons, four major languages, neutrality, but a pronounced common national identity is also instructive for democratic prospects of a possible future South Slav (con-) federation and peace in the Balkans, A proposed Illyrian Constitution would bind the South Slavs together, reconnecting individual human rights to community. Above all, moral and spiritual renewal are the necessary precondition for peace and reconciliation, as well as economic and political reconstruction and the genesis of a democratic Third Yugoslavia.

This essay explores the digital challenge, how to humanize technology, and the need to rethink the digital-human divide. This is imperative in view of superintelligent Al, which may escape human control. The information age poses quandaries regarding the uses and abuses of technology. A major critique concerns the commercial design of digital technologies that engenders compulsive behavior. All technologies affect humans in a reciprocal way. The new digital technologies-from smartphones to the Internet—where humans are tethered to machines, can impair our autonomy, hijack attention, rewire the brain, and diminish concentration, empathy, knowledge, and wisdom. The remedy is to restore deep reading, human interactions, personal conversations, real friendships, and respect for autonomy and privacy, building a nurturing culture of tolerance, coupled with transcendent norms and ideals worthy of a creature created in the image and likeness of God. This aspiration should be at the center of a new interdisciplinary field of inquiry—a phenomenology of communications.

The thesis of this essay is that the central postmodern challenge is to recover stable, objective normative standards that presuppose cultural renewal and liberal arts education building on the classical paideia of educating the whole person. Humans possess an innate moral sense that requires nurturing and developing to encompass both résumé and eulogy virtues as proposed by David Brooks’ The Road to Character. Wisdom-seeking traditions aim at self-mastery, but need tempering by neo-Kantian epistemological modesty to eschew utopias in their quest for transcendence, recalling the Augustinian conception of humanity’s fallen nature, the need for community, the aspiration for good works in the City of Man, and the soul’s yearning for redemption and salvation in the City of God. The essay concludes with the “Angel Initiative” as an example of practical wisdom that reflects Brooks’ humility code, the wisdom-seeking traditions’ emphasis on the Way, and Christianity’s promise as “a religion of second chances.”

Curiously, in the late twentieth century, even agnostic cosmologists like Stephen Hawking—who is often compared with Einstein—pose metascientific questions concerning a Creator and the cosmos, which science per se is unable to answer. Modern science of the brain, e.g. Roger Penrose's Shadows of the Mind, is only beginning to explore the relationship between the brain and the mind-the physiological and the epistemic. Galileo thought that God's two books-Nature and the Word-cannot be in conflict, since both have a common author: God. This entails, inter alia, that science and faith are to two roads to the Creator-God. David Granby recalls that once upon a time, science and religion were perceived as complementary enterprises, with each scientific advance confirming the grandeur of a Superior Intelligence-God. Are we then at the threshold of a new era of fruitful dialogue between science and religion, one that is mediated by philosophy in the classical sense? In this paper I explore this question in greater detail.