Part II of a two-part article. Part I can be read here.

By Thomas Selover

Many factors can be identified as contributing causes to the direct challenges that True Mother’s leadership has faced. Here I will focus on two elements of East Asian culture, the concept of filial piety and the Korean royal tradition.

The Problem of Filial Piety

One of the issues concerns the strength as well as the limitations of the traditional concept of filial piety (효孝). The centrality of filial piety in East Asian culture is widely recognized. Moreover, there are many passages in True Father’s teachings that emphasize the father-son relationship, particularly toward God as Heavenly Father.

A specific Confucian requirement of filial duty relevant to understanding the present controversies in the Unification movement is that a filial son should not make changes to his father’s ways for three years after the father has passed on. According to Confucius, “If for three years he makes no change from the ways of his father, he may be called filial.” Therefore, according to this tradition, it is a son’s duty not to make changes for at least three years. Thus, from a son’s point of view, objections to changes that were made during the three-year mourning period for True Father would have the backing of centuries of Confucian moral sensibility.

Filial piety is indeed a strong cultural virtue in East Asia, especially in Korea, and is good as far as it goes. But, in contrast, the classical Confucian tradition offers very little content on the husband-wife relationship. At best, the ontology of East Asian philosophy supports a concept of reciprocity between husband and wife, based on the yin-yang model, but reciprocity by itself can be emotionally cold. The Buddhist tradition also, with its emphasis on celibacy as a path of spiritual discipline, is lacking in persuasive accounts of relational love and virtue between husband and wife. The way that True Parents teach about the relationship between husband and wife, emphasizing true conjugal love as the core, is a missing ingredient in East Asian tradition.

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This is Part I of a two-part article. Part II will appear next week.

By Thomas Selover

On September 3, 2012, the Unification Church and movement entered a new and critical phase in its development. Long foretold by sociologists of religion and new religion watchers, the seonghwa (ascension) of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification movement, was accompanied and followed by anguish, confusion and realignment on various levels.

Even a brief review of the history of major religious movements shows that, in each case, the passing of the founder occasioned a fundamental transformation of the religious movement. Those movements that successfully transformed were able to survive and develop; those that did not have disappeared. The crisis of succession, or what sociologist Max Weber termed the problem of “the routinization of charisma,” would seem to be an inevitable turning point in the history of religious movements. The Unification movement is not an exception; this crisis and transformation were unavoidable.

The Unification movement is now in a very new stage of the providence, beyond what has been charted in previous understandings of the Principle and of Rev. Moon’s teachings. Even if events after his passing had unfolded in a different way, the novelty of the situation and its challenges would have been present nonetheless. Unification sources — especially the Divine Principle books, but also True Father’s speech volumes from earlier days — do not give us a comprehensive account of this time, although they do contain insights that we need. So there is a necessity for members to pray, study, and discuss together, seriously and respectfully.

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By Alison Wakelin

The American justice system, “the best in the world” as we often hear on Sunday morning talk shows, has become a travesty of its former self. Even the most foundational of truths, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, is under severe threat today. Like justice, it is becoming an antiquated notion.

Twenty-five percent of people in jail in this nation have not been convicted of any crime but are confined because they cannot come up with cash for bail. And for what are they waiting? Most of us assume they are awaiting trial, but it turns out only 3 percent of them will actually get a trial. 97% will plead guilty to something, even if they are totally innocent, rather than risk a longer sentence by appearing before a jury, on the advice of their defense attorney. This defense attorney may well have spent only five minutes reviewing the case before giving this advice, because it has nothing to do with the defendant. It has everything to do with the system.

In too many states, there is no requirement a prosecutor demonstrate criminal intent. Possibly for those who can afford an expensive defense attorney, this would be brought up as a defense, but generally, intent is irrelevant. Overwhelming numbers have now been criminalized by the system, as evidenced by the fact that with 5% of the world’s population America has 25% of the world’s prisoners. It seems highly unlikely that Americans are so much more inclined than the rest of the world to have criminal intentions, and so we must look elsewhere for an explanation.

The result of these overwhelming numbers has been a great increase in funding for prosecutors, with no corresponding increase for defense. It is a prosecutor’s dream. And to assure convictions, prosecutors simply have to add in a charge that carries with it a six-year mandatory minimum sentence. Few defendants are willing to risk this when they can plead guilty to a lesser charge that puts them in jail for a mere few months, or even lets them out with only probation.

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