Many people are familiar with European missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) who served as cultural bridges between China and the West. Not only did they bring Western knowledge and Christianity to China, translating with Chinese literati important works of philosophy, theology and science. They also brought knowledge of China to the West, through letters, reports, books about China, and notably through their Latin translation of the Confucian books in the “Confucius Sinarum Philosophus” (1687). In the last 30 years, scholarship...
The narration of conflicts is entrusted to geopolitical analysis and to news reports: our days are crowded with words and images, causing a sort of numbness to tragedy by endless repetition. But there is a lens capable of showing us facts and interpretations, an upside-down view of things that crosses the boundary between life and its representation: art, and those forms of artistic resistance that give a voice and form to the unsaid, to things whispered, to the implicit. They...
From the Tiber to the Nile The papal plane touched down at Cairo International Airport shortly after 2 p.m. having flown over the Nile Delta and the sandy colored houses of the Egyptian capital. In the distance, the silhouettes of the pyramids reminded the papal entourage and the journalists on board that we were about to land in a country with ancient civilization, of which the people of Egypt are the heirs. In fact, in his first speech at the...
The first sovereign of independent Russia, Ivan III, brought from what was once Byzantium not only his wife, but also, again freed from the Turks, the double-headed eagle, emblem and expression of an idea. Although various Eastern European countries consider themselves in some way heirs to this imperial ideal, nowhere has the tension between East and West been as strong as in Russia, except perhaps in Turkey itself. After Peter the Great, the double-headed eagle looked more and more to...
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War of 1967 that was fought between the State of Israel and the neighboring Arab countries (Egypt, Syria and Jordan), it makes sense to retrace the events that led to a conflict that altered the modern history of the Middle East and marked the emergence of Israel as a true regional power. In the Arab world, this event is considered a defeat not only in military terms, but also in...
Saint Vincent of Lerins posed the following question in the fifth century: “Can there be progress in the religion of the Church of Christ?” Today, we can phrase the question in the following way: How is the precious deposit of faith guarded and transmitted through time? How can we speak of a “development of doctrine?” Can there be progress in the religion of the Church of Christ? Here is how the ancient author answered the question: “Certainly, and the progress...
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