Partnership explores the deeper meaning of life
VANCOUVER, BC—Residents of Hong Kong are "hungry" to discover deeper meaning in their lives, says Mark Mayhew, director of the Marketplace Institute at Regent College in Vancouver.
In late November, Mayhew and three other Regent faculty members traveled to Hong Kong to launch the Faith and Global Engagement Initiative, a new partnership with the University of Hong Kong (HKU). The initiative seeks to explore the role of faith in public life in a globalized world.
"This is now an urgent issue given the re-emergence of religion as a potent social and political force in recent years across the world," says the HKU website concerning the initiative.
"With its academic freedom and its strategic location in a region witnessing a rapid growth of Christianity and other faiths, the University of Hong Kong is uniquely positioned to address these issues."
"This is very close to the heart of what we're about," says Mayhew, "which is the conviction that Christianity is true both in the private sphere and in the public sphere, and therefore has something relevant to say.
"Our whole purpose [as an institute] is to try to help people integrate more authentically their faith and their action, to serve the common good in a way that's a blessing."
Mayhew describes the two days of public workshops and lectures, which drew businesspeople as well as HKU students and faculty, as "highly successful."
"It's a very materialistic culture. It's been a centre of trading and banking for 100 years. The pace and the demands of life, particularly work life, are extremely high. So there is a real hunger for answers to the questions of life's deeper meaning," he says.
"Obviously there's a very limited source of deeper meaning if you don't go into areas of faith. The secular world really doesn't have any answers to that, and neither does science."
Speaking at one event, Paul Williams, the institute's executive director, said a big part of the problem they need to overcome is there is no current place in a secular society for "the language of morality"—and not just Christian morality.
"By virtue of that, so many substantive moral values are in practice excluded when they're desperately needed," he says. "It doesn't take too much insight to see how badly we need to [ask], for example, 'What are the moral values that we want to inhabit the market economy, business, globalization?'"
Two more trips by Regent faculty to Hong Kong are being planned for sometime in 2013.
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