The current edition of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science (Vol. 51, No. 1, March 2016) is a selection of papers written by scholars from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan for a conference held March 18–23, 2015 at the Dialogue House on the ICU campus. This interdisciplinary conference on “The Presence and Future of Humanity in the Cosmos: Why Society Needs both the Sciences and the Humanities” was jointly sponsorship by the JICUF and ICU’s Institute for the Study of Christianity and Culture. As the capstone project for his three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation (2012–2015), Dr. Thomas John Hastings, former JICUF Senior Research Fellow in Science and Religion, planned and convened the conference and co-edited this special issue of Zygon.

Hastings said that, because of the generous and steadfast support from JICUF President David Vikner and ICU Professor Jeremiah Alberg, he was enabled to raise additional funding for the conference from the Niwano Peace Foundation, the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, the Wesley Foundation, Zygon, and Georgetown University. He also wanted to publicly acknowledge the huge contribution of his staff of four ICU graduates to the conference’s success: Wakatake Naoko, Oma Tetsu, Oma Hiromi, and Inagaki Satomi.

This unique, regional gathering of scholars represents an alternative to international conferences in the humanities and social sciences, which still tend to be dominated by Western academic traditions, discourse, and protocols.

For free access to this special issue of Zygon, please click here.