Contemporary New Age transformation in Taiwan: A sociological study of a new religious movement

This article explores commentary in UK newspapers which, while sympathetic to the notion of Turkish EU membership, still deploys a discourse that remains exclusionary where assumptions of Turkey's intrinsic cultural and civilisational ‘Europeanness’ are concerned. Turkish membership is advocated as a sort of strategic supplement to a historical ontology of ‘Europe’ proceeding from a grand narrative of Latin Christendom – Reformation – Enlightenment – Modernity (adorned with the selective appropriation of Classical antiquity), superimposed upon a wider historico-cultural and religious milieu. Membership is supported on the basis that Turkey is an exceptional case, considered on the instrumental grounds of guaranteeing Turkish secular democracy within the context of EU institutions while presenting an ‘example’ to the wider Islamic ‘world’. Support for membership does not proceed from assumptions that Turkey may possess an existing, intrinsic, historically locatable European ‘right’, implied by the extension of the EU into Ottoman successor states in south-eastern Europe as well as Cyprus. The potential for the deployment of this latter discourse to support Turkish membership from an assumed a priori cultural and historical European belonging is explored.     

The Compassionate Treatment of Animals

The compassionate treatment of animals has been the focal point of speeches and writings by one of the most influential Buddhist cleric‐scholars on the Tibetan plateau today, Khenpo Tsultrim Lodrö of Larung Buddhist Academy. This essay surveys the Khenpo's broad‐based advocacy for animal welfare and details his discrete appeals to nomads in eastern Tibet to forgo selling livestock for slaughter, to eat a vegetarian diet on religious holidays, to relinquish wearing animal fur, to protect wildlife habitat, and to liberate the lives of animals. I focus on the modernist “this worldly” dimension of his advocacy, calling attention to how Tsultrim Lodrö goes beyond traditional scare tactics that emphasize the karmic effects of negative deeds in future lives and instead invokes compassion by attending to the lived experience and suffering of animals. In doing so, the Khenpo positions Buddhism as a civilizing force in order to reform certain Tibetan customs and mitigate the influence of Chinese modernity and state marketization policies. I argue that his strategy of “reverse orientalism” appropriates state civilizational discourse and reverses its terms.     

Orientalism andAntivoluntarism in the History of Ethics: On Christian Wolff's Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica

Christian Wolff's 1721 Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese is generally read as championing the autonomy of ethics from religion. This is too simple: Wolff's ethics was an antivoluntarist religious ethics. The example of the Chinese confirmed for Wolff that revelation is not necessary for knowledge or practice of genuine virtue, though he held that the Chinese achieve only the first of three "degrees of virtue." (Most Christians, including the Pietists who drove Wolff from Halle shortly after he delivered the Discourse , did not, in his judgment, achieve even that.) China's being perceived as outside of Western (and sacred) history made it a congenial example for the ethics and moral anthropology that, in Wolff's time, were struggling against the voluntarism of a Christian ethics premised on original sin.