In this timely and urgent work, Hans Kung reminds us:
- Every minute, the nations of the world spend 1.8 million dollars on military armaments;
- Every hour, 1500 children die of hunger-related causes;
- Every week during the 1980s, more people were detained, tortured, assassinated, made refugee, or in other ways violated by acts of repressive regimes than at any other time in history;
- Every month, the world's economic system adds over 7.5 billion dollars to the catastrophically unbearable debt burden of more than 1.5 trillion dollars now resting on the shoulders of Third World peoples;
- Every year, an area of tropical forest three-quarters the size of Korea is destroyed and lost;
- Every decade, if present global warming trends continue, the temperature of the earth's atmosphere could rise dramatically with a resultant rise in sea levels that would have disastrous consequences, particularly for coastal areas of all the earth's land masses.
In 'Global Responsibility', the author offers important new approaches and concludes that:
- There can be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions.
- There can be no peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.
- There can be no ongoing human society without a global ethic.
The author of twenty books, Hans Kung served as a principal architect of the theological agenda of the historic Second Vatican Council. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tubingen and President of the Global Ethic Foundation in Germany and Switzerland. He was the drafter of the Global Ethic Declaration of the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1993, and is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century.
From the Preface by the Duke of Edinburgh:
"Hans Kung has chosen to discuss what is probably the most critical and challenging issue in the debate about the future of human habitation of this globe. I very much hope that this scholarly contribution will help to stimulate a more determined search for a shared belief in the beauty and value of this planet Earth as our common and unique home in the vastness of the universe."