UNESCO Courier articles from March 1998

UNESCO Courier archives from March 1998

Month by month. (concepts on the life hereafter)
March 1, 1998... Who can fail to wonder about the mystery of the hereafter? Even those who do not believe in an afterlife feel driven to ask themselves why so many others do. Materialists, for example, view such a belief as a response to the travails of Life on...

Africa: the breath of life.
March 1, 1998... In African tradition, the material and spiritual worlds are contiguous At some time or other, every school-child in French-speaking Africa has recited this poem: Listen more to Things than to people The voice of Fire can be heard, Listen to...

China: a down-to-earth hereafter. (religious beliefs)
March 1, 1998... In Chinese civilization, the dead, the gods and the living have sound practical reasons to keep in contact Chinese civilization has never held a hard-and-fast view of the hereafter, although some aspects of it have never changed. The gods are...

India: cycles of birth and rebirth.
March 1, 1998... What role has the time-honoured belief in reincarnation played in Indian society? Once upon a time a snarling dog was standing outside an Indian temple. Another dog came up to him and asked why he was so angry. The first dog replied: "I was a...

Medieval Europe: the antechamber of eternity. (Christian church)
March 1, 1998... The medieval Christian Church in Europe created a complex system of the afterlife which played on fear The view of the hereafter current among men and women in medieval Europe was largely the Christian one. Although it included elements...

A materialist vision of the afterlife.
March 1, 1998... For Marxists, the hereafter is an instrument of power wielded by the dominant social classes The story of the hereafter in human thinking is almost as old as humanity itself. The material conditions in which early man strove for survival posed...

Living to tell the tale. (near death experiences)
March 1, 1998... Many people have crossed to the 'other side' and returned with surprisingly similar stories It is likely that for as long as man has been aware of the certainty of death he has contemplated the possibility of survival. There is nothing...

'The beyond is accessible to those who dare.' (interview with Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho)(Interview)
March 1, 1998... In the two centuries since the Enlightenment, man has become the measure of all things. This attitude of mind has changed many things for the better, but it gives short shrift to the spiritual dimension of human existence. People today need to...

Africa and the world.
March 1, 1998... The international community formed by the 186 Member States of UNESCO, conscious as it is of what Africa has to offer yet worried about the difficulties it is experiencing, has made the continent one of the priority targets of its action. As a...

Healthy housing.
March 1, 1998... Although indoor pollution is often overlooked, it directly or indirectly affects the health of a broad spectrum of people, from those living in mud huts to those whose homes are in modern skyscrapers. This pollution can come from three different...

The Nazca mystery. (Nazca geoglyphs)
March 1, 1998... Vast networks of tines etched in the soil of Nazca (Peru) over 2,000 years ago form uncanny designs whose meaning still puzzles many archaeologists. The site has been on UNESCO'S World Heritage List since 1994. The desert air, already...

Ton-That Tiet. (interview with Vietnamese composer, Ton-Tat Tiet)(Interview)
March 1, 1998... Ton-That Tiet, who was born in 1933 in Hue, the former capital of imperial Viet Nam, and has lived in Paris since 1958, is a composer who has succeeded in marrying Western musical styles with a profoundly Oriental form of thinking and...