Stephan Rothlin

“China has become of central importance not only for East Asia but for the whole of humanity. We want to continue our respectful dialogue with its people, aware that China is an important key for a peaceful world and has great potential for enriching our faith tradition, as many of its people long for a spiritual encounter with God in Christ.”
(The Documents of General Congregation 35 of the Society of Jesus, Decree 3, 2008, p.65)

INSTRUMENTS OF PEACE AND THE SPECTRE OF WAR

　　The spectre of war has again become a devastating reality in the Ukraine. While brutal recent wars in Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Central African Republic and in many other places did not quite seem to attract broad public attention regarding their destructive and evil impact, the war in the Ukraine seems a brutal wake-up call to everyone to reconsider seriously the multiple ramifications of the catastrophe of war. In this context the present essays of MRIJ9 may in a special way help us better understand how the vicious cycle of violence and war may eventually be broken or may well persist as an all-too-familiar disfigurement cruelly scarring human nature.