Overview

This book presents an analytical investigation of the Christian concept of reconciliation and the Daoist concept of harmony. It poses the question whether Christian reconciliation and Daoist harmony could be operationalized in ways to ease human suffering caused by interpersonal, intergroup, national, and international conflicts. Christianity and Daoism both describe the loss of harmonious connections with fellow humans, nature, and the sacred, but they also point to ways of reconciliation, to returning to harmony through re-connection. As an interreligious dialogue between Daoism and Christianity has hardly ever been described before, this study focuses on the question—within a hermeneutical context of singularity, difference, and concordance—whether early Daoist views on harmony and early Christian views on reconciliation could be operationalized relevantly in order to contribute to endeavors towards a resolution of interpersonal and intergroup conflicts.

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9781978716926

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Reviews

Intersecting the fields of social psychology, practical philosophy, and comparative theology, Michael Tophoff’s monograph stands out by adding an important Daoist-Christian perspective to one of the most urgent questions of our times: how to live peacefully in societies fragmented by competing identity formations. Both concise and innovative, Tophoff invites us to think through the paradigms of the Daoist sage and of Francis of Assisi, respectively. In a search for reconciliation and harmony, Tophoff provides an inspiring call for reconsidering our clinging to stiff identity categories and celebrating the uniqueness of any single human. * B. Scherer, Rector, Buddhist Seminary, The Netherlands *

Author Information

Michael M. Tophoff, clinical psychologist and theologian, teaches at the University of Amsterdam and is a Research Fellow at Vrije Universiteit.

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