This book is an attempt to critically embrace a tradition--a culture--in which the author was formed and against which he has often found himself in resistance, using academic disciplines in which he is well versed but about which he is deeply suspicious. This book began to come together as a book in a series of lectures on the history of Western thought at Shenzhen University in the People's Republic of China, an opportunity to cultivate disciplined criticism that might afford a second look at traditions behind the West which are being embraced all too quickly. In a time of acceleration, this book offers a meditation on the virtue of hesitation. The book is an invitation to philosophy and the history of ideas, but it is also a sustained critical reflection on the religious dimensions--explicit and implicit--of those ideas, with enough utopian vision left to imagine a city in which violence is not necessary.
