Joshua T. Mauldin is a scholar of religious ethics, writes on law and religion, the ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth, and religion and politics in China. He is the co-editor of Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry: Learning with and from the Natural and Human Sciences (Eerdmans, 2017) and the Oxford Handbook of Reinhold Niebuhr (forthcoming).
It is incumbent upon scholars to critically engage in the comfort women issue, particularly through the lens of political theology, in order to prevent future violence, sexual and otherwise, against various minorities throughout the world.
The reader should take away from this special issue the sense that the basic dichotomy of “the West” versus “China” needs to be reformulated. While the West has much to learn from listening to non-Western voices, the work of actually listening reveals that such sharp distinctions do more harm than good.