Italian Edition of Boulding-Ikeda Dialogue Published
Italian edition of Into Full Flower by Elise Boulding and Daisaku Ikeda
PISA, Italy: Centro Gandhi Edizioni, a non-profit publishing house in Italy, has released an Italian edition of Into Full Flower: Making Peace Cultures Happen, a dialogue between the late Dartmouth College Professor Emerita of Sociology Elise Boulding (1920–2010) and Daisaku Ikeda.
Born in Norway in 1920, Prof. Boulding raised
five children while completing her Ph.D. in Sociology. She helped found the
International Peace Research Association (IPRA) where she served as the
secretary-general and held many other positions while engaging in peace
activities from a standpoint of a mother and homemaker.
The two authors discuss the creation of a
culture of peace from diverse perspectives, exploring themes such as peace in
the family and the local community, women’s strength and the potentiality of
children. They agree that change is born of creative movements comprised of
people with a shared sense of responsibility.
At the conclusion of the dialogue, when asked
for a message to young people working for peace in the twenty-first century,
Prof. Boulding introduces the concept of the two-hundred-year present: the two
hundred years comprising the century that has passed since the birth of those
who became centenarians today and the century that will pass before infants
today turn one hundred. “We have and will come into contact with people living
through those two centuries. . . . Our contact with them means that we do not
live in the present only,” she says, urging readers to consider the impact of
their lives and their encounters in the context of this greater span of time.
President Ikeda agrees,
stating, “A brilliant future begins here and now with our first bold step
forward. By devoting ourselves completely to the cause of peace, we can make
recompense to the victims of past wars and create a world in which the people
of tomorrow indeed live in happiness.”
This is the fourth language edition of this
book.
[Adapted from an article in the November 1, 2021, issue of the Seikyo
Shimbun, Soka Gakkai, Japan]
