In 1987 Mike Robbins, a young journalist in London, felt restless and decided to travel. He never really stopped. In the quarter century that followed he lived and worked in countries as diverse as the world itself. The pieces in this book take the reader from rural Sudan to the headwaters of the Amazon, from Semana Santa in Quito to Buddhist temples in the Himalayas, across Bhutan on a motorbike, into the ancient souk of Aleppo, to the steppes of Central Asia and finally to New York. Along the way there is Ethiopian gin, a sex tourist in Moscow, Kyrgyz women in cycling pants, a surreal toilet in Brussels, echoes of slavery in Brazil, and an encounter with Helen of Troy in Third Avenue. The Nine Horizons is an anarchic snapshot of a troubled but beautiful world in transition.

A complete exploration is the first systematic analysis ever comparing the central religious doctrinal aspects of Christianity with those in Confucianism. Huang's work carefully covers the whole history of the Confucian-Christian tradition, and ends up with genuinely new insights. He elaborates on the idea of transcendence in the Confucian tradition in a manner which enables an interpretation of the Christian means of salvation. His explanation of transcendence, and its connection with the means of salvation, is new and unique, offering a clue to the special understanding of salvation germane to the specifically Chinese intellecual history. Huang's book is a must for anyone interested in the Sino-Western cultural encounter.

Called "spellbinding" (Scientific American) and "thrilling...a future classic of popular science" (PW), the up close, inside story of the greatest space exploration project of our time, New Horizons’ mission to Pluto, as shared with David Grinspoon by mission leader Alan Stern and other key players. On July 14, 2015, something amazing happened. More than 3 billion miles from Earth, a small NASA spacecraft called New Horizons screamed past Pluto at more than 32,000 miles per hour, focusing its instruments on the long mysterious icy worlds of the Pluto system, and then, just as quickly, continued on its journey out into the beyond. Nothing like this has occurred in a generation—a raw exploration of new worlds unparalleled since NASA’s Voyager missions to Uranus and Neptune—and nothing quite like it is planned to happen ever again. The photos that New Horizons sent back to Earth graced the front pages of newspapers on all 7 continents, and NASA’s website for the mission received more than 2 billion hits in the days surrounding the flyby. At a time when so many think that our most historic achievements are in the past, the most distant planetary exploration ever attempted not only succeeded in 2015 but made history and captured the world’s imagination. How did this happen? Chasing New Horizons is the story of the men and women behind this amazing mission: of their decades-long commitment and persistence; of the political fights within and outside of NASA; of the sheer human ingenuity it took to design, build, and fly the mission; and of the plans for New Horizons’ next encounter, 1 billion miles past Pluto in 2019. Told from the insider’s perspective of mission leader Dr. Alan Stern and others on New Horizons, and including two stunning 16-page full-color inserts of images, Chasing New Horizons is a riveting account of scientific discovery, and of how much we humans can achieve when people focused on a dream work together toward their incredible goal.

Chinese traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism have a profoundly philosophical dimension. The three traditions are frequently referred to as three paths of moral teachings. In this book, Mou provides a clear account of the textual corpus that emerges to define each of these traditions and how this canonical axis was augmented by a continuing commentarial tradition as each generation reauthorized the written core for their own time and place. In his careful exegesis, Mou lays out the differences between the more religious reading of these traditions with their defining practices that punctuate the human journey through life, and the more intellectual and philosophical treatment of the texts that has and continues to produce a first-order culture of annotation that become integral to the traditions themselves. At the center of the alternative religious experience reflected throughout the teachings of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism is the project of personal cultivation as it comes to be expressed as robust growth in family and communal relations. For Mou, these three highly distinctive and yet complementary ways of thinking and living constitute a kind of moral ecology, wherein each of them complements the others as they stand in service to a different dimension of the human need for an educated spirituality.

The Horizon of Modernity provides an extensive account of New Confucian philosophy that cuts through the boundaries between history and thought. This study explores Mou Zongsan's and Tang Junyi's critical confrontation with Marxism and Communism in relation to their engagement with Western thinkers such as Kant and Hegel. The author analyzes central conceptual aporias in the works of Mou, Tang, as well as Xiong Shili in the context of the revival of Confucianism in contemporary China and the emergence of the discipline of philosophy in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history. This book casts new light on the nexus between the categories of subjectivity and social structure and the relation between philosophy, modern temporality, and the structural conditions of the modern world.

Transactions include brief accounts of the activities of member societies.