Seeing All Things Whole
The Scientific Mysticism and Art of Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960)
Foreword by J. Wentzel van Huyssteen
Imprint: Pickwick Publications
Thomas John Hastings is Executive Director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC) in New Haven, editor of the International Bulletin of Mission Research (IBMR), and adjunct faculty at Yale Divinity School. He was formerly Senior Research Fellow at the Japan International Christian University Foundation in New York City; Director of Research, Associate Director, and Research Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry; and adjunct faculty at Princeton Theological Seminary. While serving with his wife, Carol, as Presbyterian Church (USA) Mission coworkers in Japan (1988–2008), he was a tenured faculty member at Hokuriku Gakuin University, Seiwa College, and Tokyo Union Theological Seminary. He is the author of Practical Theology and the One Body of Christ: Toward a Missional-Ecumenical Model (2007) and numerous articles, chapters, and translations in Japanese and English.
"Focusing on Kagawa's scientific interest and its impact upon his thought, Hastings shows the famous Japanese Christian mystic, novelist, and political activist to have offered a prophetic vision of cosmic wholeness to a tragically divided modern world. In so doing, Hastings reclaims Kagawa's vision for our own troubled time."
--Ann Astell
Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame
"This is truly an excellent intellectual biography of a Japanese Christian who declares 'My religion is the life with the consciousness reconciled to the Creator of Heaven and earth in the mediation of Jesus Christ.' His unrestricted movement between science and religion is to be expected, because he sees all dimensions of life artfully interpenetrating each other within the arcs of evolutionary history and redemptive love."
--Inagaki Hisakazu
Professor of Philosophy, Tokyo Christian University, Japan
"Hastings offers a lucid intellectual biography of this great, controversial Japanese evangelist and social reformer. In a pluralistic and scientific age of Interstellar and quantum entanglement, Kagawa comes alive again in this volume and gives us a breathtaking glimpse of how all things hold together in Christ."
--Paul Louis Metzger
Professor of Christian Theology and Theology of Culture
Multnomah University
"Drawing extensively on Japanese sources and scholarship, Seeing All Things Whole provides an insightful intellectual genealogy and analysis of Kagawa's thought and vision of the spiritual, social, and natural worlds. While this study explicates the relationship between Kagawa's mystical experience and his understanding of modern science, it also provide readers with a deeper understanding of his involvement in a wide-range of 'cosmic repair' activities--relief work in the slums and various forms of social and political engagement, for example--which occupied him to the end of his life."
--Mark R. Mullins
Professor of Japanese Studies
University of Auckland, New Zealand