James W. Heisig

Edition combining "Remembering the Hiragana" and "Remembering the Katakana"

n Jesus' Twin, a scholar shares his personal reflections into the Gospel of Thomas offering a learned, accessible introduction as well as inspiring insights into these ancient texts that have long stirred curiosity and inquiry. James Heisig, who has read and studied the texts throughout his distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of religions, shows that the reasons for excluding the Gospel of Thomas from the Christian tradition are largely meaningless for us today. After more than half a century of concerted dialogue with other traditions, we are in a better position to recognize that not every alter Jesus is a Jesus alias. At the same time, attention to the spiritual demands being made on Christianity by our present age helps draw us more deeply into the text itself and control the tendency to immunize ourselves against its discomforts, whether through the distractions of scholarly disputation or the preoccupation with preserving orthodoxy.

To many scholars in the world of religious studies, Zen is a world apart from the world of politics, and the philosophy of the Kyoto school is a politically neutral blend of intellectual traditions East and West, Buddhist and Christian. This volume challenges those assumptions by focusing on the question of nationalism in the work of Japanese Buddhist thinkers during and after the Pacific War. Fifteen Japanese and Western scholars offer a variety of critical perspectives concerning the political responsibility of intellectuals and the concrete historical consequences of working within a religious or philosophical tradition. The first group of essays debates the role of Zen Buddhism in wartime Japan. A second group of essays examines the political thought and activities of Nishida Kitaro, the doyen of the Kyoto school. A third group of essays questions the complicity of other philosophers of the Kyoto school in the wartime spirit of nationalism and analyzes the ideas of modernity and the modern nation-state then current in Japan. This carefully documented volume offers a wealth of information and reflection for those interested in prewar and wartime history, Zen, Japanese philosophy, and the problem of nationalism today.