Invitation to an RVP Project on

Re-Learning to Be Human for Global Times:

Challenges and Opportunities

At present the RVP is launching a new international project on “Re-Learning to be Human for Global Times: Challenges and Opportunities”. A two-day consultation was held December 18-19, 2015 in order to begin by listening to various cultures and civilizations.

Background

As humanity moves ahead it is challenged by its own global reach. But globalization is not entirely new for the RVP. In the early 1990s the end of the Cold War emphasized taking all cultures into account – now called globalization. This was new and the “global imaginary” entailed seemed to promise great opportunities. But now, some 20 years later, we are finding how it challenges as well.

How then to create the paths ahead: how to discover the main challenges and opportunities; and how to interrelate one culture to another in a way which gathers them together in a pattern that is not abstract but concrete and continuous, analogous and dialogical? Moving ahead with the progress of the world, we must not lose what had been acquired, but build upon what had been achieved.

To navigate globalization as a major transition which threatens world order and generates millions of immigrants the special challenge of our times is to go both more broadly and deeply in dimensions that are both horizontal and vertical, with inclusive breadth and inspiring transcendence.

Theme and Subthemes

Parallel to the previous RVP project on a secular age, responding to this process of globalization will require delineating a complex of subthemes. Singly or conjointly, these should drive research and teaching forward, in a cohesive and creative manner to reach minds and hearts in this complex global age. Each of these subthemes should in turn suggest multiple more focused teams for interdisciplinary research, related conferences, papers and books. These can draw upon, or contribute to, their own cultures, understood as ways of life.

In the emerging crises of global times the overall effort would seem to cluster around the general theme: “Re-Learning to be Human for Global Times: Challenges and Opportunities.”

A set of subthemes suggest ways of deepening human wisdom, moving ahead with the general processes of human need and discovery, and engaging in intensive global dialogue. This could include for example the following sub-themes:

I. Listening and Discerning the Signs of the Times;

II. Ways of Thinking/Knowing (Social Imaginaries and Wisdom through the long process of evolution from the most remote past on into the future);

III. Ways of Beiing (Drawing upon and in turn shaping the major world cultures with metaphysics onward creavitity);

IV. Aesthetics (Cultural Uniqueness and Comprehensive Norms);

V. Cultural, Transcendent and Religious Values (Ways of Acting in the Major Civilizations).

These could be variously divided or combined as for example,

(1) Human Flourishing (e.g., Culture, Values, Economics, etc.) and Global Challenges;

(2) Crossing Boundaries and Fusion of Horizons (e.g., not "we and ours" but "they and theirs");

(3) Wisdom in specifically different cultures as ways of life.

Project Purpose

This multi-year project will have sets of research teams in the different cultures and civilizations across the world to study related issues under the general theme “Re-Learning to be Human for Global Times: Challenges and Opportunities”. Each team will consist of multiple specialists based in their own cultural perspectives and produce a study on a specific sub-issue. These will feed into a World Congress which will gather some 6000 leading scholars in Beijing in 2018. There they will exchange findings from their own regions and return to their work throughout the world to share related insights and aspirations in their formation of future generations of world leaders for decades to come.