Volume III – (1999-2000)
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40th Anniversary Forum: The Unification Church in America
Forty years have passed since the first Unification missionaries landed on American soil: Dr. Young Oon Kim on January 4, 1959, David S.C. Kim on September 18, 1959, and Col. Bo Hi Pak on March 14, 1961. The movement that these notable Korean elders planted in America has grown and developed, recording notable accomplishments and…
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Turning Points: Ten Defining Moments in the History of the Unification Tradition in America 1959-99
Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 3, 1999-2000 – Pages 5-26 Mark A. Noll’s Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity offers an intriguing model for assessing the development of the Unification tradition in the United States. What Noll, a widely published Protestant evangelical church historian, essentially does is to survey two millennia of…
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Dynamics of Messianism
Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 3, 1999-2000 – Pages 27-40 I am currently working on a comparative paradigm for messianism, a conceptual scheme drawn from the study of various messianic movements throughout world history. Such a typology may help us understand new messianic movements as they arise. What is a messiah? What is the difference…
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The Unification Church: Theory vs. Practice / Ideal vs. Reality
Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 3, 1999-2000 – Pages 41-56 The advantage to living in a time when new religious movements spring up is that one can observe an emerging religion in its origin and development, even though one is always an outsider and never gains an insider’s perspective. With established religions, we often forget…
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Unificationism in America: Models of Success
Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 3, 1999-2000 – Pages 57-72 “If you have been in the Unification Church for decades and you do not have any spiritual children, then you are parasites, robbers!” Rev. Sun Myung Moon, 1994.5.10 If the Unification Family Church cannot grow in membership, enabling members to gain spiritual children, then it…
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Faith and Reason: A Unificationist View
Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 3, 1999-2000 – Pages 73-84 Faith and reason are often juxtaposed as two different ways of cognizing the truth of God in the Christian tradition. The problem, however, is that there has been no authoritatively definitive description of the relationship between faith and reason in that tradition. Different theologies have…
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Endowed with a Sense of History
Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 3, 1999-2000 – Pages 85-100 “Communism, begun in 1917, could maintain itself approximately 60 years and reach its peak. So 1978 is the borderline and afterward communism will decline; in the 70th year it will be altogether ruined. This is true. Therefore now is the time for people who are…
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Use of the Internet by the Unification Movement
Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 3, 1999-2000 – Pages 101-116 We are in the midst of a revolution as great as translation of the Bible into vernacular, as great as the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution. The impact of the Internet is just beginning to be felt. The Unification Church[1] has adopted the new technology…
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Nicholas of Cusa: His Idea of the Coincidence of Opposites and the Concept of Unity in Unification Thought
Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 3, 1999-2000 – Pages 117-129 Nicholas of Cusa was a harbinger of a new era. His family name was Cryftz, which means ‘Krebs’ in contemporary German or ‘crab’ in English; but he was called after his native town Cues on the Moselle, where he was born in 1401. He attended…