穆斯林学者眼中的儒教与孔子——回儒对话:基于文化自觉之上的文明对话

文明对话成为当今世界的主题和话语交流的关键词,这是全球化驱动之下的一种必然的文化现象。特别是20世纪90年代以来,发生在东亚—太平洋区域的超越世界近代以降西方中心主义的“回儒对话”值得关注,这种基于文化自觉之上的两大古老文明间的对话意义尤其深远。中国穆斯林学者和国外穆斯林学者对儒教所持的不约而同的文明对话的态度与分析范式又值得研究和借鉴。     

A Religion for an Age of Science

The period 800–200 B.C.E. has been called an axial period or age because it was a period of major technological and cultural change that led to the development of new worldviews, which in turn called for and led to the emergence of the current major world religious traditions. The world is now in the midst of another period of major global scientific, technological, and cultural change that is leading to the development of a new global worldview. In this worldview, the cosmos is taken to be more like an activity than a thing—more like an emergent complex of interrelated and interactive doing in space–time than a created complex of beings in space and time–and its complexity and space—time scale are understood to be enormously greater than heretofore supposed.
These changes in worldview call for changes in theology, religion, and ethics. Most workers in the field of science and religion are heeding this call by attempting to reconcile traditional religious concepts with the new scientific concepts. Others, however, have become convinced that the new worldview differs so radically from the previous ones as to mark a new axial age, which calls for a new, post-traditional theology, religion, and ethics, with a theos that is more like an activator of doing than a ground of being, and with meaning and purpose achieved more by a quality of doing than a quantity or quality of being.