A Case for Interdisciplinary Conversations in East Asia

A group scholars from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in art, history, religion, philosophy, natural and social science, and theology gathered from March 18–23, 2015, at the Dialogue House on the campus of International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo to discuss papers they had written on “The Presence and Future of Humanity in the Cosmos: Why Society Needs Both the Sciences and the Humanities.” For the sake of readers who may not be so familiar with the East Asian context, I would like to present some background information on why I think this kind of regional interdisciplinary conference is so important today. Let me begin by saying that, if I had not experienced the wondrous disorientation of learning Japanese and teaching practical theology and the history, philosophy, and practice of education in Japan for more than twenty years, I probably never would have given much thought to the following questions that focus on the symbolic creation and maintenance of power structures in global academia today.

The first reason I want to offer in support of regional interdisciplinary conversations has to do with fields of study themselves, and, more specifically, the relative stability or variability of the phenomena that the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences opt to investigate, as well as the procedures they each employ in their investigations. Even though the revolution in the natural sciences grew out of classical and medieval notions of natural philosophy in the cultural context of “Christendom,” it is arguable that the presumptive “global standard” employed by natural scientists today reflects no particular cultural bias. By contrast, such a “global standard” does not exist nor would it be desirable for the humanities, which by definition are concerned with variable historical and contemporary cultural phenomena. The same may be said regarding phenomena—if not procedures—in the social sciences, since psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists provide quantitative and qualitative description, analysis, and interpretation of highly variable psychological, social, and cultural phenomena. Phenomenological stability (i.e., a neuron is a neuron in Bosnia or Brazil) and experimental reproducibility dictate that investigations in the natural sciences proceed along the same lines regardless of location. By contrast, the variability of phenomena under consideration in the humanities and the social sciences means that the norm of reproducibility does not pertain there. This apparent weakness is one reason that natural science sometimes appears to have decisively triumphed over the humanities and social sciences. If these distinctions between phenomena and procedures are accurate, regional conversations today are not only warranted, they are an ethical imperative if we hope to expand humanity's knowledge base in a way that deepens mutual understanding.

A second and related rationale for regional interdisciplinary conversations focuses on historical and political questions about membership at the “global academic table.” Although scholars in the natural sciences generally write their papers in English and participate in global conferences as a matter of course, humanities and social science scholars in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan belong to small, field‐specific academic guilds functioning in their own countries and languages, and those with financial means sometimes participate in international conferences convened by established guilds, which are still mostly headquartered in Europe and North America. The participation of East Asian scholars in these kinds of international exchanges has surely produced and will continue to produce certain mutual benefits. Nevertheless, it is easy to overlook or downplay the obvious fact that these international conferences, which are mostly conducted in English, are also governed by “Western” intellectual traditions, modes of discourse, and cultural protocols. This means those from non‐Western cultures who wish to participate in these international meetings must first master a foreign language—usually English—and also must accommodate their modes of thinking, writing, speaking, and interacting to a different cultural norm. Aside from specialists in non‐Western cultures, there is, of course, no corresponding requirement that scholars in the humanities or social sciences in Europe and North America master a non‐Western language or accommodate their modes of thinking, writing, speaking, and interacting to a different cultural norm.

Such a situation, which is a legacy of colonialism, imperialism, Westernization, and globalization, has created a global academic table with strictly restricted seating. In spite of ours being dubbed the “Asian Century,” it would be naïve to minimize the power of habitus (Bourdieu ) and expect academic power structures established during the so‐called “American Century” (twentieth) or “British Century” (nineteenth) to capitulate or be dismantled any time soon. The current arrangement of the table obviously puts non‐Western scholars at a disadvantage. To get a clearer sense of exactly what I mean, please indulge me in the following brief thought experiment.

The year is 2075. You are a junior scholar teaching German philosophy in the United States. However, in order to be recognized as a legitimate academic peer on the global stage, you must present your recent work on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in Mandarin at an international conference in Shanghai. Not only must you master Chinese to accomplish this daunting feat, you also must unpack Hegel's thought by referencing Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist conceptualities, writing and speaking in a style appropriate to the East Asian cultural context.

Whether or not such an imagined future is on the horizon, you see my point. If nothing else, I hope this thought experiment might especially give readers who work exclusively in English some sense of the formidable challenges facing non‐Western scholars who hope to make a contribution on the global scene.

One small way of acknowledging and beginning to extend the global academic table is for scholars in regions like East Asia, who share some similar cultural and linguistic (i.e., the Chinese writing system) traditions, to come together in regional conferences like the recent one in Tokyo, freed from the presence and “tutelage” of acknowledged Western academic luminaries. Perhaps if such regional academic partnerships can begin to build their own momentum, the Western academic world might finally begin to acknowledge that there really do exist legitimate, alternative perspectives to those rooted in Sinai, Athens, Jerusalem, and Berlin that have inspired and guided societies for millennia.

A third structural and pragmatic reason for regional engagements is related to the history of how modern systems of learning were imported into and took shape in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Beginning with Japan in the late nineteenth century, the emerging nation states of East Asia officially adopted the so‐called “Berlin” model of the modern research university, which had appeared in Europe quite recently in the early nineteenth century. Distancing themselves from the classical liberal arts or renaissance studia humanitas curriculum grounded in the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), these new universities separated increasingly specialized fields of knowledge and investigation into autonomous academic disciplines. On the one hand, the advent of the modern research university was a creative response to historical developments that accompanied the scientific and industrial revolutions, such as new technologies, urbanization, and the expansion of educational opportunity beyond the aristocracy and clerics to a growing urban middle class. The new university structure was also a way to cope with the explosion of knowledge, especially in the natural sciences, engineering, and technology, but also in the emerging human or social sciences of psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology. On the other hand, the new structure also had certain unintended consequences, as well‐tested pedagogies for transmitting knowledge across generations were marginalized in favor of utilitarian approaches believed to serve the pressing needs of the modern nation state, i.e., industrialization, acquisition of wealth, militarization, professionalization, and institutionalization.

As one example of the consequences of this move toward greater field specialization and autonomy, it is easy to forget that, just as “natural science” had its origins under the rubric of “natural philosophy,” the new field of psychology was often listed in the philosophy department until the late nineteenth century or, in places such as Princeton University, the early twentieth century (Princeton University ). In spite of the advent of this new university structure made up of disconnected departments, in practice academic fields were not as “siloed” as they tend to be today, and scholars often moved seamlessly from one field to another.

An analogous process occurred in East Asia as religio‐philosophical epistemologies, rooted in Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and local traditions and their accompanying pedagogical institutions and practices, were cast aside in favor of utilitarian approaches thought to be in keeping with the values and goals of the modern university. Perhaps most notably, the notion of an integrated, interdependent “cosmos” of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity (天地人), formerly seen as essential in the moral and spiritual formation of a mature person, gave way in these new universities to increasing specialization, departmentalization, and fragmentation. This marginalization of the “ancient learning” accounts, in part, for our choice of the conference title, “The Presence and Future of Humanity in the Cosmos.” As you will discover when you read these papers, older modes of thinking of course did not disappear with the introduction of the “Berlin” structure in East Asia's national universities. Early on in this process, reflexive slogans such as “Japanese Spirit, Western Learning” (和魂洋才wakon yōsai) were adopted as ideological strategies for trying to preserve humanistic cultural values, even while Japan's government rushed headlong in pursuit of industrial, economic, and military parity with the Western colonial and imperial powers.

Back in Europe and North America, the legacy of classical, medieval, and humanist pedagogical theories and practices naturally endured as a kind of cultural conservatism, perhaps most notably in private colleges and universities affiliated with religious groups, but also in the modern research university. This “pushback” may be seen in part as a response to the perceived threat of the loss of a holistic vision for holding the disciplines together; which, of course, was the original intention of the universitas. While departmentally separate, even pragmatists in institutions like the University of Chicago could still argue that the arts (humanities) and sciences made distinct yet vital and complementary contributions to the intellectual, moral, and vocational formation of the next generation. However, with the declining public role of established religious institutions, which had formerly maintained vigorous commitments to higher education, the ideological shift to instrumentalist, technological, and market‐driven rationalities centered more on immediately measurable outcomes rather than the slower, organic, cultural ideal of Hellenistic paideia. It is little surprise that critical, reflective, and imaginative pedagogical engagements gradually showed signs of buckling under the weight of what Martha Nussbaum has called a “use and manipulation” mentality (Nussbaum ). Whether or not there is a genuine crisis in the humanities is an ongoing debate today, but even in the United States, where there has been a vibrant tradition of liberal arts education, there is real anxiety about the future of the humanities (American Academy of Arts and Sciences ).

How might this story of the ideological shift to instrumentalist, technological, and market‐driven rationalities relate to the situation in East Asia today? To give but one example, there is a post‐war saying in Japan that, “When America sneezes, Japan catches a cold.” This is perhaps one way to interpret the ominous June 2015 letter of Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology ordering national universities to take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities] organizations or to convert them to serve areas that better meet society's needs” (Traphagan, ). A recent report says, “At least twenty‐six of Japan's sixty national universities that have departments of the humanities or the social sciences plan to close those faculties after a ministerial request from the Japanese government, according to a new survey of university presidents by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper” (Social Science Space ). This directive has also created an outcry and some initial signs of resistance. However, while there may be an awareness and appreciation of moves in Europe and North America to secure an enduring place for the humanities and social sciences in the current environment, analogous grassroots movements have not yet arisen in this region. To repeat, although East Asian scholars in the humanities and social science have produced significant work in their native languages for local guilds, they are still woefully underrepresented in international circles. By contrast, East Asians in the natural sciences (including medicine), technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are expected to write papers in English. Especially given heightening economic competition and political friction within the East Asian region itself, it is easy for politicians and government bureaucrats to capitulate to the pressure to bank on STEM research and training. At any rate, it is clear that, in places like Japan, the humanities and social sciences have failed to make a convincing public case for their value and relevance, which in today's world is linked to global ranking.

In fact, considering the strong emphasis on professional qualifications or competencies measured by standardized examinations, it may be argued that, in spite of the “humanist” character, for example, of traditional Confucian learning, the instrumentalist rationality is already stronger in higher education in East Asia than in the West. After all, while sharing with the West the “form” of the modern research university, the nations of East Asia obviously do not share the same legacy or cultural “spirit” of classical, medieval, and renaissance humanism out of which the modern university grew. To repeat, whereas the modern university arose in the same soil as Western classical and humanist traditions, it was imported as a “foreign transplant” into East Asia as a pragmatic means of achieving the goals of the nation state. Hence, except perhaps for private universities that struggle to preserve some religious or ethical identity, it is easy to conclude in East Asia today that the non‐instrumentalist, reflective, critical, and imaginative ways of knowing embodied by the humanities are admirable but not really necessary for life in contemporary society.

This brings us at last to the point of the conference. There are of course vital and distinct philosophical and religious ways of knowing shared by the peoples of East Asian that have yet to be mined as resources for a response to the growing rift between science and the humanities. In the search for a contextually sensitive integration of variant modes of knowing, a pressing, albeit daunting question is how might the various local religions, Confucianisms, Daoisms, Buddhisms, Christianities, and new religions in East Asia contribute positively to such a response.

Although some readers may be nervous about granting religion and even theology a place at the table in interdisciplinary conversations on science and the humanities, what I have in mind is a genuine willingness to pool resources and learn from each other in the spirit exemplified, for example, by theologian Amos Yong, who concludes in regard to his own tradition, “A Christian theology of nature can and must learn from the sciences and other wisdom traditions, including Buddhism” (Yong ). It is likely that the natural sciences, especially if they continue to be so closely aligned with instrumentalist, naturalist, materialist, and anti‐teleological views, will continue to challenge humanity's religious and philosophical traditions. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that those traditions will continue to embody and preserve other ways of seeing, feeling, knowing, and acting. As a sophisticated theological response to the rift between the science and the humanities, Yong outlines what he calls a Christianity‐Buddhism‐Science Trialogue on fundamental questions of “spirit” and “nature.” Yong's approach is an example of the kinds of interdisciplinary exploration we envisioned for the Tokyo conference and for the subsequent conversations it and other similar gatherings might generate.

The Papers

Before commenting on the papers, I want to mention that one of the highlights of the Tokyo conference was the open‐ended, far ranging, and mutually invigorating conversations engendered by these and the other papers. Because the participants came from a broad range of fields (art, history, religion, philosophy, natural and social science, and theology), we could not assume shared theoretical frameworks, conceptual lexicons, or methodologies. Nevertheless, each participant offered a unique angle on the question of “Why Society Needs Both the Sciences and the Humanities,” and voiced concern and commitment to the larger question of “The Presence and Future of Humanity in the Cosmos.” We happily avoided the kind of intra‐disciplinary wrangling and power struggles so common in conferences of colleagues in the same field. Based on evaluations, I think this small conference helped to reinvigorate the participants, and, hopefully, their research and teaching. Such regional conferences may also help open up the cultural wisdom of East Asia to the world in new ways that are relevant to some of the global challenges of our time. On behalf of all of the participants and supporters, I hope you enjoy reading these papers and look forward to your feedback.

In the first section entitled “Where Are We?”, Chen Na provides a nuanced exploration of the complex, reflexive history of East Asia's ideological interactions with the West. He focuses specifically on how Confucianism, which has all of the hallmarks of a religion, came to be regarded in China as something other than a religion within the “New Culture” discourse of the early twentieth century. This surprising outcome was part of a newly emergent “regime of truth” (Foucault ) generated from the reception of modern science and the blending of Western and Chinese versions of Orientalism and “latent Orientalism.” Pointing to the current resurgence of Confucianism in China, which is passionately and paradoxically embraced even by President Xi Jinping, Chen concludes that a deconstruction of the New Culture discourse is an inescapable task awaiting future scholarly work.

Just as Chen claims Confucianism as the shared center of Chinese identity, the next paper by Kamata Toji points to Shinto as a vital tradition for the Japanese. In light of Chen's paper, it is worth noting that Shinto, in the context of early twentieth century Japan, also came to be regarded as something other than religion, albeit for very different reasons than Confucianism in China. A “free‐lance” Shinto priest who spearheads an ambitious interdisciplinary research agenda, Kamata seeks to offer a reassessment of Shinto stripped of its infamous associations with Japanese nationalism and militarism. Comparing Shinto with Japanese Buddhism, Kamata portrays it as a religion of place, sense, expression, and ecological wisdom that embeds human beings in nature, thus providing a fertile site for multidisciplinary research in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. He concludes by briefly sketching what he calls “research on techniques of body and mind transformation” (心身変容技法研究 shinshin henyō gihō kenkyū) and offering his view of the distinction between the humanities and science.

Kim Seung Chul, a Korean Christian theologian working in Japan, takes the discussion in a different direction. He argues that Asian Christians must seek new ways to integrate the dialogue between Christianity and religion, which is an inescapable part of daily life as a minority faith in East Asia, with the dialogue between Christianity and the natural sciences, which will continue to transform certain inherited religious ideas. In a way that is similar to Yong's above‐mentioned proposal of a trialogue between Christian, Buddhism, and Science, Kim insists that Asian theology cannot run away from a two‐directional interrogation from religion, on the one hand, and from science, on the other. In this disorienting or decentering process, Asian Christian theology may discover some helpful conversation partners and resources, for example, in the wisdom of Buddhist notions of the “dependent arising” of all things (pratītya‐samutpāda) or “emptiness” (śūnyatā).

The fourth and final piece in the opening section is Lee Yu‐Ting's reflective assessment of the problematic category of “East Asia.” It offers a nuanced, personal perspective on the restricted global academic table I sketched above. Playing on the tensions and pendulous swings between universalism and relativism that run like a thread through modern and postmodern discourse in the West, Lee focuses his inquiry around five questions about civilizations, institutions, semiotics, psychology, and cognition. He begins by briefly recounting his personal intellectual journey from technical, mathematical studies in industrial management in Taiwan, to humanistic studies in comparative literature in Great Britain, and finally on to Japan, where he centered his doctoral research on Asian intellectual history and cultural interactions. He ponders whether or not “East Asia” is really a helpful civilizational category and whether or not this part of the world may have resources that might “complement and modify the Western paradigm that has brought human history to a bottleneck.” While he guardedly answers in the affirmative, he also wants to avoid an East Asian universalism to counter the more familiar Western pattern.

Starting off the second section entitled, “How Did We Get There?”, Hsu Kuang‐Tai, a historian of science in Taiwan, explores the relationship between Confucianism and science in China, contrasting the “naturalistic” approach to science in the West with what he calls an “associative” or “correlative” approach in China. After introducing “the natural philosophy of qi,” which functions in Chinese history in an analogous way to the Christian notion of natural law, he shows how the qi philosophy provided an ethical and political framework for circumscribing human action and interpreting the relation between human beings and certain anomalous natural phenomena such as comets. After a section that unpacks the encounter, comparison, and competition between Western and Chinese traditions of science, which led to the conclusion that Confucianism was “conservative and regressive” (cf. Chen's paper), he concludes by praising the universal benefit of the Hippocratic Oath and also suggesting that the holistic Confucian view, which correlates politics, ethics, and nature, may have a positive contribution to make in a world threatened by anthropengic global climate change.

Although Hsu touches on China's initial contact with Western science at the time of the sixteenth century Jesuit mission led by Matteo Ricci, the next essay, co‐authored by Si Jia Jane and Dong Shaoxin, focuses on the strategy of the early Protestant missionaries to China in the nineteenth century, and the following somewhat similar piece by Zhao Aidong recounts the Protestant missionary transmission of Western forms of knowledge and technical skills in early twentieth century Eastern Tibet. According to Si and Dong, missionaries in the early nineteenth century carried out traditional evangelistic work, such as Bible translation and preaching, while introducing Western medicine as part of a strategy for making personal contact with Chinese. They imply that a particular view of “scientific truth” was used to expose the “unscientific” methods of traditional medicine as a means of opening the Chinese to evangelical truth claims. Si and Dong present several exemplars of this strategy and leave the reader asking other questions, such as what these interactions might have meant to the Chinese who benefitted from the medical interventions, how might the missionaries’ views of Chinese traditions have been different had they had more adequate language training, and how this missionary strategy concretely impacted subsequent social reforms and cultural self‐understanding. In contrast to Si and Dong's more critical appraisal, in a case study largely based on reports of Disciples of Christ missionary Albert Shelton, Zhao shows that medical work was augmented by more practical contributions in house building, agriculture, irrigation, industrial education, and science education that impressed the people, thereby making a positive and lasting contribution to Eastern Tibet. As parallel missionary strategies in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan also linked evangelism with efforts in medicine and education, comparative work across the region should provide deeper insight into how the relationship between modern science and the “foreign faith” came to be framed in each location.

The third and final section, “East Asian Engagements with Science,” begins with two pieces, the first by me and the second by Inagaki Hisakazu, both focusing on the writing and legacy of Kagawa Toyohiko. My piece fills in some of the background that led up to the highly anomalous Cosmic Purpose (1958), Kagawa's final book, which extended “religio‐aesthetic teleology” that argues for “directionality” on every level of reality within a complex range of factors he called “the logic of finality.” After presenting Kagawa's modest conclusions about “initial purpose,” I offer an overview of the holistic spirituality, cosmology, and social ethics of this Christian evangelist and social reformer who welcomed findings in the natural sciences as “revelatory” and drew freely on a broad range of Western and Asian religious and philosophical traditions. Like Teilhard de Chardin, Kagawa tried to bring the insights of evolutionary theory into positive conversation with religio‐philosophical meditations on the emergence, evolution, and persistence of life in a vast universe. Inagaki, a trained physicist and public Christian philosopher, portrays Kagawa as a pioneering exemplar of the kind of robust public, social, and scientific engagements that Japanese Protestant Christians have generally shunned. He criticizes the latter for settling for a faith centered on the salvation of the soul, which he says is in keeping with modern existentialism and Japanese Buddhist spirituality. Inagaki helpfully points out that Kagawa's reading of science was sometimes based on outmoded evidence, as when he claims that a “selection principle” is at work on the level of quantum mechanics. Inagaki attributes this error to Kagawa's use of Arnold Sommerfeld's early work. On the other hand, Inagaki highly praises Kagawa's religious intuition and sees his holistic vision as highly relevant today, inasmuch as he sought to overcome the explicit “Japanese Spirit, Western Learning” (和魂洋才Wakon Yōsai) dualism between the humanities (Wakon) and the sciences (Yōsai).

In the next piece, mathematician and theologian Hyun Woosik offers an East Asian perspective on the “transhuman,” which he defines as that which “is evolving from homo sapiens to homo transcendentalis.” According to Hyun, this evolution or transformation must be analyzed, since it minimally involves an extension and perhaps ultimately a replacement of the human by the technological and thus must be something more than just the next step in Darwinian natural selection. Drawing on cognitive science, mathematics, and theology, he explores “the transhuman as transcendence,” arguing for a compatibility between notions of “technological singularity” and Gödel's “AI‐thesis,” “the transhuman as compactification,” using that mathematical conceptuality to suggest how the transhuman may be viewed as an extension or augmentation of some deficiency in the human, and “the East Asian transhuman and samtaegeuk,” offering the East Asian “triune Absolute as Heaven‐Earth‐Human” as an inseparable unity represented by the Korean samtaegeuk image. Hyun concludes his exploration by posing a series of unanswerable questions about how the transhuman might be realized and conceptualized in the future and how this might impact understanding of and relation to the maximal reality of God. He ends by making a strong plea for future interdisciplinary work along the lines of a “glocal metastudy of science and religion.”

Kang Shin Ik, a trained doctor of dentistry and professor in medical humanities, proposes “bio‐socio‐humanities” as an alternative to E. O. Wilson's “sociobiology,” which he sees as a contemporary form of social Darwinism, inasmuch as it grants evolutionary biology priority over the social sciences and humanities. As one concrete way to extend the global academic table we described above, Kang proposes the ancient East Asian metanarrative of the “Way” (Dao), which conceives of Heaven, Earth, and the Person as a relational whole, as an alternative to the “Word” (Logos) epistemology of Greece, which he says is grounded in transcendent command. Bringing the “Way” into conversation with recent approaches in the cognitive sciences, Kang recommends that we reimagine the different fields of investigation “jumping together” on a trampoline as a way toward “a horizontal organization of nature via culture rather than a vertical integration of culture into nature.”

The next paper by Fukushima Shintaro, a scholar in cultural and social psychology, presents findings of a multi‐layered analysis on the relation between economic status and a sense of well‐being. After showing that national and individual level analyses yield somewhat different results, he introduces relative economic status on a local level as a possible explanation for the gap between the different levels of analysis. He then turns specifically to the question of well‐being in an East Asian context, pointing out that 96% of subjects in psychological research listed in the top journals were from the West. Not only does this mean that the results of these studies cannot be generalized, it is a glaring, if perhaps unwitting, consequence of the restricted global academic table. He then introduces findings from the field of cultural psychology, pointing to significant cultural differences between the ways of thinking of people in Western and East Asian societies, which help to account for different cultural construals of well‐being. Comparative research bears out a preference in Japan, for example, for “interdependent happiness” over individual happiness. He then mentions the limitations of empirical studies and concludes that social scientific research may be significantly enhanced by interdisciplinary approaches that take on the narrative approaches of the humanities.

The final essay by theologian Shin Jaeshik challenges the presumption of universality in the Western‐centric science and religion discourse and proposes an East Asian “multi‐map” model as another approach to the relationship between science and religion. He begins by describing the East Asian worldview and way of thinking, which he characterizes as holistic rather than analytic. Two key features of this view are what he calls a “cosmoanthropology” and seeing the world as a dynamic and interrelated whole. Our conference theme, “The Presence and Future of Humanity in the Cosmos,” while sounding somewhat odd to a contemporary Western ear, was chosen to draw attention to the East Asian “cosmoanthropology” Shin describes. He then presents a description of the “non‐dualistic” East Asian “Yin‐Yang” thinking as a relational and dynamic continuum, in contrast to the dualistic antinomy so common in Western modernity. After a consideration of what he calls Wolfhart Pannenberg's “horizontal” approach and John Haught's “vertical” approach to religion (theology) and science, he offers his own reading, claiming Pannenberg and Haught both (1) assume science and religion are different realities; (2) are influenced by the fixed “book” metaphor and thus lack a dynamic element; (3) are highly abstract and do not account for the broader dimensions of religious experience and tradition; and (4) are hierarchical, finally granting marginal control to religion (theology). Based on the East Asian ways of thinking he has introduced, Shin offers a “multi‐map” model, which he thinks is more holistic, relational, and inclusive.

The Occasion and Acknowledgments

From September, 2012, to August, 2015, I led a research project called “Advancing the Science and Religion Conversation in Japan.” One goal of this project was to begin to broaden the interdisciplinary conversation beyond Japan to include scholars from other countries in this region of the world variously referred to as Northeast or East Asia. The March conference at International Christian University (ICU) was the result. In order to include a range of voices, we deliberately expanded the focus from “science and religion” to “science and the humanities.” With the exception of my own contribution, all of the other papers in this issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science on “East Asian Voices on Science and the Humanities” were originally discussed in draft form at the conference.

There are several people and institutions to thank. First, I want to sincerely thank all of the conference participants who, in the midst of busy academic schedules, devoted six days to gather in Tokyo after preparing papers and reading all of the others in advance. Their pre‐conference preparation helped facilitate focused discussions of the papers and open‐ended reflections on the conference theme. Next, I want to thank our local sponsor in Tokyo, ICU's Institute for the Study of Christianity and Culture and their director, Jeremiah Alberg, who not only participated in the entire conference but also encouraged me during the two plus years of planning. Also, I want to thank our joint sponsor, the Japan ICU Foundation and especially David Vikner, their recently retired president, who graciously welcomed my research project and supported this conference as an expression of the foundation's own mission. In terms of recruitment, I owe a very special thanks to Tao Demin of Kansai University and Kim Seung Chul of Nanzan University, who recommended potential participants from China, Taiwan, and Korea. I also want to sincerely thank Willem B. Drees, editor of Zygon, for making the trip to Tokyo from the Netherlands, offering a public lecture at ICU on “Humans and Humanity: Science and Values Today,” and inviting the publication of conference papers for this special issue of Zygon. A heartfelt thanks is also due to Makoto (“Mako”) Fujimura, Nihonga artist and advocate for “culture care,” who made thoughtful contributions to the discussion and graciously allowed me to interview him after a showing of an inspiring film focusing on his life and work. I want to offer a special thanks to Mitsuhiro (“Mitch”) Kaneda, ICU alumnus, Japan ICU Foundation trustee, and professor of economics at Georgetown University, who led us each morning in “mindfulness meditation” sessions that strengthened the clarity and focus of the lively, generous, and far‐ranging interactions that followed each day. A very special thanks is due to our conference staff in Tokyo, led by the highly organized and affable Wakatake Naoko, and ably assisted and executed by Oma Tetsu, Oma Hiromi, and Inagaki Satomi, all ICU graduates. Their professional teamwork was so exemplary that one ICU professor asked them if they might be available to run another upcoming conference on campus. This conference was a remarkable international collaboration, and I wish to thank the following institutions for their generous financial support or support in kind: The John Templeton Foundation (Conshohocken, PA), the Japan ICU Foundation (New York City), International Christian University (Tokyo), the Niwano Peace Foundation (Tokyo), the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia (Hong Kong and New York City), the Wesley Foundation (Tokyo), Zygon, and Georgetown University (Washington, DC).