Langdon Gilkey (1919–2004)
Auteur de Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure
A propos de l'auteur
Born in Chicago, Langdon Gilkey received his B.A. at Harvard University (1940) and earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University (1954). He has been a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University (1950--51) and has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, the first to Germany in 1960--61, and then to Rome in afficher plus 1965. Gilkey is currently a professor of theology emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Gilkey's pedagogical concern is in examining the place of religion within a secular culture. With the prevailing appearance of religious sentiments such as fundamentalism, cult practices, meditation, and private ideology, he notes religion to be very much an aspect of our scientific and technological age. The question for our age, Gilkey says, will be "not will religion survive, as much as will we survive and with what sort of religion, a creative or demonic one?" (Bowker Author Biography) afficher moins
Crédit image: Photo courtesy of The University of Chicago
Œuvres de Langdon Gilkey
Religion and the scientific future; reflections on myth, science, and theology (1970) — Auteur — 41 exemplaires
Nature as the image of God: signs of the sacred 1 exemplaire
Anchor Books 1 exemplaire
Il destino della religione nell'era tecnologica 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932) — Introduction, quelques éditions — 1,138 exemplaires
Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, Vol 2) (1996) — Contributeur — 30 exemplaires
The Mormon History Association's Tanner Lectures: The First Twenty Years (2006) — Contributeur — 8 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom légal
- Gilkey, Langdon Brown
- Date de naissance
- 1919-02-09
- Date de décès
- 2004-11-19
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu de naissance
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Lieu du décès
- Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
- Études
- The Ashville School
Harvard College
King's College (UK)
Union Theological Seminary
Columbia University - Professions
- theologian
professor - Relations
- Gilkey, Sonja Weber (wife)
- Organisations
- University of Chicago
- Prix et distinctions
- Shailer Mathews Professor of Theology, University of Chicago Divinity School
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Prix et récompenses
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Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 20
- Aussi par
- 5
- Membres
- 942
- Popularité
- #27,279
- Évaluation
- 3.8
- Critiques
- 6
- ISBN
- 31
It powerfully evokes a very civilized despair for the human social condition. It implies that the Western notion of the social contract to be a wistful, romantic notion. I think I said that in a nice way. Shantung Compound was a blunt, clarifying, transformative read for me.
In Gilkey’s words, “This book is about the life of a civilian internment camp in North China during the war against Japan . . . Because internment-camp life seems to reveal more clearly than does ordinary experience the anatomy of man’s common social and moral problems and the bases of human communal existence, this book finally has been written.”
Gilkey was a 24-year-old American teacher in a Chinese university when World War II commenced. He and about 2,000 others, mostly Europeans including academics, clergy and businessmen, were imprisoned for more than two years in relatively benign conditions in the Weihsien camp near Shantung. Their Japanese captors provided the bare minimum of food and coal, and told the inmates to run the camp inside the walls.
Shantung Compound is Gilkey’s account of the endlessly frustrated attempts, by various camp leaders and elected committees and a few charismatic individuals, to enforce a fair allocation of the smallish rooms and dorm beds, to get everyone to do a fair share of work, to prevent stealing, to settle social disputes, to provide for the exceptional needs of the elderly, the frail, the young kids, the nursing mothers….
The overwhelming truth is that, facing the prospective dangers and daily extremities of camp life, nearly all of the internees didn’t “rise to the occasion” to protect the weak and to cooperate rationally for their own good and the common good.
Instead, this is what nearly all of the internees—most of them white, educated, Western—tended to do most of the time: they conspicuously looked out for themselves and their families, declined to do more than a modicum of work, refused to give up some of their “equal” share of food and housing to needier fellow inmates, shied away from volunteer leadership, declined to share the contents of relief parcels sent by their “own” governments, stole food and supplies whenever possible, refused to punish the egregious wrongdoers among them, and rationalized most of their uncharitable, uncooperative and uncivil behavior in complex variations of religious and humanist moralities….
Mind you, this wasn’t humanity in a state of nature. No “. . . Nature, red in tooth and claw” stuff. The Japanese guards remained aloof from the prisoners’ largely autonomous camp administration, and permitted black market trading with villagers outside the camp. The internees lived in dismal but not life-threatening conditions. They lived peaceably, often manifesting their shortcomings in a nominally genteel way. In a perverted sense, they were in a protected environment, and really didn’t worry much about anything except surviving in a tolerably impoverished condition as part of a generally homogeneous group.
They could have lived an Enlightenment fantasy. They could have established a coherent community with orderly cooperation, consensual leadership and rational allocation of food, housing and civic niceties to appropriately satisfy the disparate needs of all.
But they didn’t.
Here endeth the lesson for today.
More on my blogs:
http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/
http://historybottomlines.blogspot.com/… (plus d'informations)