What is intergenerational responsibility? The present chapter aims at answering this question by demonstrating the following two points. First, future-oriented responsibility essentially requires past-oriented responsibility and vice versa (I call the former the ‘foreseeing-care-prevention’ type and the latter the ‘letting-the-dead-be’ type). Hence, second, intergenerational responsibility is composed of these two different and interdependent types of responsibility. I begin by clarifying what is meant by the foreseeing-care-prevention-type. Interpreting Derek Parfit and Hans Jonas, I try to characterize it in detail. Then I address the letting-the-dead-be type. In this context, I deal with Confucianism and the Japanese philosopher Tetsurô Watsuji. Lastly, I discuss how both of the types of responsibility are interconnected with each other, and conclude that our intergenerational responsibility means that we are responsible for future people and responsible to past generations at the same time.

Historical writing described a form of imaginal enchantment, as illustrated by Hans Jonas’ concept of “gnosticism,” André-Jean Festugière’s “religion of the world,” and Frances A. Yates’ “Hermetic Tradition.” The importance of overcoming philhellenist ideologies, and the centrality of nonduality and embodiment to Hermetic spirituality.

This chapter reflects on the ongoing scientific revolution as a metaphysical and even theological revolution, whose unarticulated presuppositions about being, nature, knowledge and truth have governed the so-called dialogue between science and religion. The essence of this revolution is captured in the Baconian triumph of art over nature, which conceives of nature mechanistically and knowledge pragmatically in advance of scientific inquiry and has produced a scientific and technological civilization that exceeds even Bacon’s utopian imagination in the New Atlantis and offers both promise and peril for the human future. Simultaneously challenging and conceding the stunning triumph of this utopian vision, and in dialogue with John Milbank’s poetic and ‘magical’ proposal to enfold its genuine achievements within a radically creational ontology, Hanby attempts to set forth some principles for any genuine dialogue in the future and for any conception of being, nature, knowledge and truth adequate to the Christian doctrine of God and the Christian vision of creation.

Cormac McCarthy scholars have long noted the Gnostic themes evident in the author’s work. Like many of his literary influences, McCarthy’s novels focus on the problems of suffering, violence, and evil, but McCarthy displays a unique tendency to examine these matters in the context of the Gnostic worldview, examining the nature of the divine soul in the material world, humanity’s tenuous place within the indifferent cosmos, and questions regarding religious authority, all fundamental both to the Gnostic religious experience and to understanding McCarthy’s literary oeuvre. While critics have most often focused on Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian in their analysis of McCarthy’s Gnostic themes and imagery, McCarthy’s general focus on problematic human authorities, and the problematic nature of authority in all human affairs, especially law and religion, appears in practically all of McCarthy’s novels, beginning with The Orchard Keeper. McCarthy’s portrayals of authority demonstrate his knowledge of original Gnostic texts and the influential scholarly works that first explained these texts to the wider world after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library.