"Thomas Hastings's holistic approach to the spirituality of Kagawa Toyohiko offers an integrative, organic account of Kagawa's life and writings. Focusing on Kagawa's scientific interest and its impact upon his thought, Hastings shows the famous Japanese Christian mystic, novelist, and political activist to have offered a prophetic vision of cosmic wholeness to a tragically divided modern world. In so doing, Hastings reclaims Kagawa's vision for our own troubled time."
--Ann Astell
Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame
"This is truly an excellent biography of a Japanese Christian who declares 'My religion is the life with the consciousness reconciled to the Creator of Heaven and earth in the meditation of Jesus Christ.' Acknowledging the failure as well as the success engendered by his tireless efforts to renew the Japanese traditional society with Buddhism and Confucianism, Kagawa was an extraordinary exemplar of the 'demythologization' of the self, and his apologetic vision was prophetic in as much as he grasped a future that was as yet not present, embodying a radical hope of an activist spiritual wisdom grounded in and reflecting Christ's redemptive love. Seeing Christ's cross as the principle of 'cosmic repair, ' he saw its salvific effects extending beyond the individual Christian and the Church, beginning with the weakest and forgotten members of society and reaching out to embrace the entire cosmos. His unrestricted movement between science and religion is to be expected, because he sees all dimensions of life artfully interpenetrating each other within the arcs of evolutionary history and redemptive love."
--Inagaki Hisakazu
Professor of Philosophy, Tokyo Christian University, Japan
"Thomas John Hastings offers a lucid intellectual biography of the great, controversial Japanese evangelist and social reformer Kagawa Toyohiko. This portrait's distinguishing trait is its disclosure of the life-enhancing synthesis of science and religion as a dimension of Kagawa's global vision and message against the backdrop of cosmic struggle and strife. Hastings ably demonstrates that what some might see as tangled strands come together to form a vast web of intricate relations involving all spheres grounded in cosmic purpose for altruistic love and cooperation. In a pluralistic and scientific age of Interstellar and quantum entanglement, Kagawa comes alive again in this volume and gives us a breathtaking glimpse of how all things hold together in Christ."
--Paul Louis Metzger
Professor of Christian Theology and Theology of Culture
Multnomah University
"Drawing extensively on Japanese sources and scholarship, Seeing All Things Whole provides an insightful intellectual genealogy and analysis of Kagawa Toyohiko's thought and vision of the spiritual, social, and natural worlds. In this study, Thomas Hastings has shown how Kagawa's thought was shaped over the course of his childhood by neo-Confucian and Buddhist traditions, post-conversion education in Reformed Christian institutions, extensive study of Western philosophy and science, and profound religious experiences and spiritual discipline. While this study explicates the relationship between Kagawa's mystical experience and his understanding of modern science and theories of evolution, it also provide readers with a deeper understanding of his involvement in a wide-range of 'cosmic repair' activities--relief work in the slums and various forms of social and political engagement, for example--which occupied him to the end of his life."
--Mark R. Mullins
Professor of Japanese Studies
University of Auckland, New Zealand