Seeing All Things Whole [Hardcover]

Kagawa Toyohiko was one of the best-known evangelists and social reformers of the twentieth century. Founder of several religious, educational, social welfare, medical, financial, labor, and agricultural cooperatives, he was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature (1947 and 1948), and four times for the Nobel Peace Prize (1954, 1955, 1956, and 1960). Appealing to the masses who had little knowledge of Christianity, Kagawa believed that a positive interpretation of nature was a key missiological issue in Japan. He reasoned that a faith, which is rooted in the downward movement of Christ's incarnation, must support the scientific quest and meditate on the purpose or upward movement implicit in scientific findings. Through an anti-reductionist methodological pluralism that strives to sees all things whole, this scientific mystic employed a wide range of Japanese and Western cultural resources to assert a complementary role for science and religion in modern society. Focusing on Kagawa's scientific interest and its impact upon his thought, Hastings shows the famous Japanese Christian mystic, novelist, and political activist to have offered a prophetic vision of cosmic wholeness to a tragically divided modern world. In so doing, Hastings reclaims Kagawa's vision for our own troubled time. --Ann Astell Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame This is truly an excellent intellectual biography of a Japanese Christian who declares 'My religion is the life with the consciousness reconciled to the Creator of Heaven and earth in the mediation of Jesus Christ.' His unrestricted movement between science and religion is to be expected, because he sees all dimensions of life artfully interpenetrating each other within the arcs of evolutionary history and redemptive love. --Inagaki Hisakazu Professor of Philosophy, Tokyo Christian University, Japan Hastings offers a lucid intellectual biography of this great, controversial Japanese evangelilÃØ