Is a Harmony of Cultures Possible? Part I

By Cynthia Chung [This is a transcript of an RTF lecture I delivered in January 2023.] For those who are not aware of who is Gotthold Lessing, I will speak of him as a person and his contribution to German culture later on, but he is considered the father of German classical literature. And “Nathan…

Brunelleschi’s Dome: The Project that Inspired a Renaissance

by Cynthia Chung To this day, over 550 years after its construction, the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral remains a proudly cherished national treasure of the Italians, attracting tourists from all over the world to gaze upon its magnificence in person. It is not only appreciated for its incredible beauty but also as the largest…

The Harmony Between Tianxia and Westphalia

By Matthew Ehret I have noticed that many pro-Chinese thinkers and writers have lately made the mistake of presuming that Chinese culture and civilization stands in total opposition to the divisive/imperially minded western culture which has laid waste to much of the world over the past centuries. This perception has expressed itself in the various…

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia: A Phase Shift in Universal History

Today’s world is shaped by a tension caused by two opposing paradigms pulling humanity into two directions. Where one is unipolar and premised around an organizing principle of “Might makes Right”, the other is multi-polar and shaped by a principle of “win-win cooperation”. Where one is imperial- defining “value” around the material extraction of land…

Why the Study of Ancient History Must Be Reformed

Our understanding of humanity’s place in the universe and how it came to be is the result of centuries or even millennia of scholarship and dedicated inquiry. But what happens when an intellectual heretic arises, one whose ideas or theory threatens to undermine humanity’s most essential understanding of itself? Is the heretic and his or her…