SOURCE: “The New Ethics: Global Responsibility,” in New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 44-9.

In the following interview, Küng details his ideas for the future of religious understanding and a common world ethic.

[Gardels:] Is this the last modern century?

[Kung:] I would be more radical than that. Strictly speaking, modernity ended in 1918. World War I shattered the belief in inevitable progress toward peace and prosperity, “the end of history,” as Hegel put it. And the hegemony of Europe—cradle of the Enlightenment and the secular ideology of Reason—began splintering with the breakdown of the colonial system and the devolution of power to several centers including America, the Soviet Union and China.

And, already by 1918, the bad faith of nihilism, the moral detritus of modernity, had become the key concern of writers and intellectuals.. .

Yes, after all, Nietzsche, who died in 1900, had already pronounced that...