Walls to Bridges: The Global Ethic

by Hans Küng What do the religions and ideologies of the world have in common? Why should we focus first on their similarities rather than their differences? What’s next in the evolution of the global ethic? Professor and theologian Hans Küng has devoted much of his life to answering these questions. A controversial figure, Küng achieved global notoriety in the late ’60s when he became the first major Roman Catholic theologian of the 20th century to question the notion of papal infallibility. For this, he was stripped of his license to teach as a Roman Catholic theologian but carried on teaching as a tenured professor of Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tübingen, Germany until his retirement in 1996. In the 1990s, Küng initiated a project that subsequently referred to the Movement for a “Global Ethic” (“Weltethos” in the original German). After massive worldwide research into past and present ethical principles carried out with the collaboration of many scholars, including