The growing tension between mainland China and Taiwan has a cultural aspect closely related to national identity. We focus on recent history curriculum changes in the mainland and in Taiwan and find that education authorities on both sides have implemented master narratives for content selection in and organization of history textbooks. In mainland China, the master narrative of pluralist unity constructs a geographically consistent Chinese nation throughout history, which bolsters the state's current claim to a territorial integrity including Taiwan. In Taiwan, the master narrative of multiculturalism becomes the essence of Taiwanese identity, and weakens Sinocentrism in Taiwanese official historiography.

In light of the problem of the postmodern “de-centered” subject for Christianity, I address the loss of a common expectation horizon of the eschatological future. This loss is situated within the wider collapse of modern metanarratives and the dispersal of the primacy and critical power of the future, leading to an incomplete and even shattered process of identity formation for Christians. By recovering elements of Edward Schillebeeckx's eschatology, I suggest a way forward by drawing on the wider Christian tradition and hope for salvation as an essential element for the ongoing process of identity formation, while using his thought to critique the fractured postmodern “self” and contemporary trends in culture, religion, and economics.

I offer a brief outline of The Beauty of the Infinite, pointing up its similarities with and differences from John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1990), and the violence of its rhetoric. I then take issue with Hart's reading of Nicholas Lash on the death and resurrection of Christ. I argue that not only is Lash closer to Hart than Hart allows, but that Lash recognizes the necessarily unfinished nature of Christian story telling. Hart is led by his rhetoric of out‐narration to affirm an unsustainable completeness that elides the terrors of suffering and death, the very fault for which Hart chides Lash. Having noted Hart's misdirection I conclude with an appreciation of his aesthetics.