title: Alek Skarlatos

text: Skarlatos won the Republican primary, on May 19, 2020, defeating Nelson Ijih with 86% of the vote. Skarlatos lost the general election to incumbent Democratic congressman Peter DeFazio in the 2020 November general election, finishing with 46.2% of the vote against DeFazio's 51.5%. By several weeks before the election, Skarlatos had outraised his opponent by about $500,000, mostly from smaller independent individual donations plus larger individual donations, with DeFazio raising more PAC money.


title: Alek Skarlatos

text: In May 2021, Skarlatos announced that he would run again for Oregon's 4th congressional district in the 2022 United States House of Representatives elections. He was unopposed in the Republican primary.


title: Alek Skarlatos

text: After redistricting for the 2022 election, the 4th District contained a higher percentage of Democratic-leaning voters than before. DeFazio announced in late 2021 that he would retire. Oregon Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle announced that she would run for the seat and was endorsed by DeFazio. Hoyle won the May 17 Democratic primary. Skarlatos faced Hoyle in the November 8 general election but lost his election bid.


title: Alek Skarlatos

text: In September 2018, Skarlatos became an honorary naturalized French citizen, along with Stone and Sadler. A naturalization ceremony was held in Sacramento in January 2019. Skarlatos was raised a Presbyterian, but is now a member of a Lutheran church.


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: David Wayne Williams (February 29, 1972 – August 14, 2002) was an American vocalist best known as the original lead singer for the rock band Drowning Pool.


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: He grew up in Princeton, Texas, living with his parents Charles Edward and Jo-Ann Williams. He grew up in a pious family who caused him to move away from religion. Notably, he also used to wear a T-shirt that read "Worship Satan and Smoke Crack".


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: In 1999, he joined Drowning Pool, who had formed in 1996 and had previously performed as an instrumental three-piece. The band released their debut album with Williams, "Sinner", in 2001. Williams soon gained recognition for his performances with the band; his nickname "Stage" came from Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell, who gave it to him because of his known stage personality.


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: On August 14, 2002, Williams was found dead in the band's tour bus in Manassas, Virginia. An autopsy established that he had died from heart failure caused by hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (heart muscle disease), which went undiagnosed until his death.


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: A public funeral was held in Plano, Texas, on August 18, 2002, at 10:00 am. A DVD titled "Sinema" which chronicles his life, has since been released. His lifelong dream was to buy his parents a house; the sales from "Sinema" fulfilled his dream posthumously.


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: Williams's microphone was given to Cristian Machado from Ill Niño. They were good friends, so after his death, Drowning Pool and Williams' family gave it to Machado as a token of respect. The band Memento dedicated their set to Williams on the Ozzfest 2003 stage.


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: The Dallas, Texas music community honored Williams and his legacy with a multi-venue music festival named "Stage Fest". Stage Fest was held in downtown Dallas' Deep Ellum district on August 14, 2007, the fifth anniversary of his death, and played in seven Deep Ellum venues including Club Dada, The Curtain Club, The Lizard Lounge, The Darkside Lounge, Red Blood Club, Reno's Chop Shop, and Tomcat's.


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: On August 14, 2012, the 10th anniversary of his death, Drowning Pool released the ballad "In Memory Of..." dedicated to him.


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: The re-released 13th anniversary of "Sinner" contains never before released footage of Dave Williams and his bandmates speaking about meaning of the songs on the "Sinner" album and more.


title: Dave Williams (singer)

text: Footage of Williams while he was in Fugly (one of his previous bands) surfaced on the internet. It was the band Williams mentioned in the 13th anniversary "Sinner" release, while naming all the bands he was in before Drowning Pool.


title: Woke (TV series)

text: Woke is an American comedy television series co-created by Keith Knight and Marshall Todd and starring Lamorne Morris. The series premiered on Hulu on September 9, 2020. On November 17, 2020, Hulu renewed the series for a second season, which premiered on April 8, 2022. In June 2022, Hulu cancelled the series after two seasons.


title: Woke (TV series)

text: Keef Knight, creator of "Toast & Butter", is a black cartoonist on the verge of mainstream success. He prides himself on 'keeping it light' and shies away from taking controversial stances. After being racially profiled by overly aggressive policemen, the traumatized Keef finds that he's able to see and hear inanimate objects talking to him. Now more sensitive to racism, and the everyday microaggressions he'd tried so hard to avoid acknowledging in every situation, Keef must figure out how to maintain his relationships and a career as a 'woke' black man.


title: Woke (TV series)

text: Jay Dyer served as the showrunner for the first season. Anthony King was the showrunner for Season 2.


title: Woke (TV series)

text: As "Woke" Is being produced by ABC Studios and Sony Pictures Television Studios It Expected to be released on Disney + internationally as part of the Disney-Sony Deal that means Shows and Movies owned by Sony such as "Woke" will come Disney +.


title: Woke (TV series)

text: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 74% based on 42 reviews, with an average rating of 5.8/10 for the show's first season. The website's critics consensus reads, "Though "Woke" first season doesn't quite know what it wants to say about racism in America, its solid ensemble—led by a well-cast Lamorne Morris—and some surreal silliness make it a messy conversation worth watching." Metacritic gave the series a weighted average score of 61 out of 100 based on 19 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews."


title: Brooke Hayward

text: Brooke Hayward (born July 5, 1937) is an American actress and model. Her memoir, "Haywire" was a best-seller.


title: Brooke Hayward

text: Born in Los Angeles, Hayward is the eldest of three children born to agent turned film, television, and stage producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan. Brooke Hayward is a great-granddaughter of Monroe Hayward, former U.S. Senator-elect from Nebraska, and the granddaughter of Colonel William Hayward, who led the United States' 369th Infantry Regiment, aka the "Harlem Hellfighters", the first regiment composed entirely of African-American soldiers during the First World War. She is also a descendant of Mayflower passenger William White, and pilgrim Robert Coe. Hayward had a younger sister, Bridget, who died of a drug overdose, and a brother, producer William Hayward III, known as "Bill Hayward", who committed suicide.


title: Brooke Hayward

text: When Hayward was seven years old, the family moved to a farm in Brookfield, Connecticut. Hayward's parents divorced in April 1948. The following year, Hayward's father married Nancy "Slim" Hawks (later known as Slim Keith). After his divorce from Slim Hawks, Leland Hayward married Pamela Harriman. Her mother married importer and producer Kenneth Wagg in 1950. Margaret Sullavan died of an accidental drug overdose on January 1, 1960. Nine months later, on October 17, 1960, Hayward's younger sister Bridget was found dead of a drug overdose in her apartment in New York City. Bridget left what was described as an "incoherent note", the contents of which never were made public. Her death was ruled a suicide. Hayward's brother Bill died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on March 9, 2008.


title: Brooke Hayward

text: In May 1961, Hayward made her Broadway debut in the stage production of "Mandingo" opposite her future husband Dennis Hopper. She made her film debut that same year in Burt Balaban's "Mad Dog Coll". In one early episode of "Bonanza" ("The Storm", 1962), she played sea-ship captain's daughter Laura White. She delivered a memorable performance in the "Twilight Zone" episode "The Masks" in March 1964. Over the next 30 years, Hayward appeared in a handful of screen roles.


title: Brooke Hayward

text: Throughout the 1960s, while married to actor, director, and photographer Dennis Hopper, Hayward took an active role in the contemporary art world, collecting works by such artists as Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein. She was also an avid collector of antiques from various periods and known for a highly idiosyncratic sense of design, as demonstrated by the house she shared with Hopper and their children, 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in Los Angeles.


title: Brooke Hayward

text: In 1977, Hayward wrote the best-seller "Haywire", a childhood memoir that expounded on her family, the mental breakdowns of her mother and sister, and her own personal demons. Her last screen appearance was in a small role in John Guare's 1993 film adaptation of "Six Degrees of Separation", with Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland, and Will Smith.


title: Brooke Hayward

text: Hayward was married to Michael M. Thomas from July 1956 until their July 1960 divorce; they had two sons (William Thomas and Jeffrey Thomas).


title: Brooke Hayward

text: Hayward met actor Dennis Hopper when they were both cast in "Mandingo" on Broadway in the spring of 1961. They were married in August 1961. They had a daughter, designer Marin Brooke Hopper, in June 1962 and together went on to be a force at the center of the creative scene in Los Angeles in the 1960s, collecting Pop art and enjoying a high degree of access to the worlds of contemporary art, rock music, and Hollywood. They separated in 1968 and divorced in 1969. The story of Hayward and Hopper's marriage, along with their childhoods and later lives, was told by Mark Rozzo in the best-selling 2022 cultural history/biography "Everybody Thought We Were Crazy".


title: Brooke Hayward

text: In 1981, Hayward began living with the pianist and bandleader Peter Duchin. They were married in 1985 and separated in 2008. They divorced in 2011. She divides her time between her loft in Manhattan and her country house in Litchfield County, Connecticut.


title: Janel Moloney

text: Janel Moloney is an American actress. She is best known for her role as Donna Moss on the television series "The West Wing", a role for which she received nominations for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2002 and 2004. From 2014 to 2017, she starred on the HBO drama "The Leftovers".


title: Janel Moloney

text: Her early work included television guest roles on "ER", "Sports Night", "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.", and "Murder, She Wrote". Starting in 1999, Moloney had a recurring role on "The West Wing" as Donna Moss, assistant and eventual love interest to Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford). Moloney was originally credited only as a guest star, but she appeared in every episode of the first season. From the second season onward, Moloney was listed in the main credits. Moloney has received two Emmy Award nominations, one in 2002 and one in 2004, for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama.


title: Janel Moloney

text: Moloney appeared in the television film "Bang Bang You're Dead" with Thomas Cavanagh and Randy Harrison, which was first broadcast on October 13, 2002 on Showtime. She played the part of Amber Frey in the made-for-TV movie "Amber Frey: Witness for the Prosecution", broadcast May 25, 2005 on CBS. In 2007, Moloney played Dana Chase, who has a relationship with Tommy Caffee (Jason Clarke) in six episodes of the second season of "Brotherhood".


title: Janel Moloney

text: In 2008, Moloney appeared in one episode ("It's a Wonderful Lie") of "House M.D." In 2008, she guest-starred in an episode of "30 Rock". Moloney appeared in the 3rd installment of the Lstudio.com web series "Puppy Love".


title: Janel Moloney

text: In 2009, she appeared in the US series "Life on Mars" as Professor Pat Olsen in the episode "Revenge of the Broken Jaw". She also appeared in the episode "Faithfully" of "" as Allison Wyler.


title: Janel Moloney

text: In 2007, Moloney made her Off-Broadway stage debut as Theresa in the Playwrights Horizons production "100 Saints You Should Know", written by Kate Fodor and directed by Ethan McSweeny. She appeared in the Off-Broadway play "Love, Loss, and What I Wore" in September through October 2, 2011.


title: Janel Moloney

text: Moloney starred in the 2010 feature film "Armless", as Anna. She made a brief appearance as Earlene in the 1995 Walter Hill directed western "Wild Bill", and appears in the 2013 film "Concussion".


title: Janel Moloney

text: Born in Woodland Hills, California, Moloney is the niece through marriage of actress Christine Ebersole, and attended the acting conservatory at SUNY Purchase. During the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, she was an active supporter of John Kerry's campaign and made public appearances on its behalf. Moloney has a son, Julius, with composer Marcelo Zarvos.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Joshua Gibson (December 21, 1911 – January 20, 1947) was an American baseball catcher primarily in the Negro leagues. Baseball historians consider Gibson among the best power hitters and catchers in baseball history. In 1972, he became the second Negro league player to be inducted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Gibson played for the Homestead Grays from 1930 to 1931, moved to the Pittsburgh Crawfords from 1932 to 1936, and returned to the Grays from 1937 to 1939 and 1942 to 1946. In 1937, he played for Ciudad Trujillo in Trujillo's Dominican League and from 1940 to 1941, he played in the Mexican League for Rojos del Águila de Veracruz. Gibson served as the first manager of the Cangrejeros de Santurce, one of the most historic franchises of the Puerto Rico Baseball League.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Gibson was known as a spectacular power hitter who, by some accounts, hit close to 800 career home runs. He was known as the "black Babe Ruth"; in fact, some fans at the time who saw both Ruth and Gibson play called Ruth "the white Josh Gibson". Gibson never played in the major leagues because of the unwritten "gentleman's agreement" that prevented non-white players from participating. He stood and weighed at the peak of his career. He was the first player since Oscar Charleston to win consecutive batting Triple Crowns (leading the league in home runs, runs batted in, batting average) and no batter has achieved the feat since.


title: Josh Gibson

text: On December 16, 2020, Major League Baseball announced that it will recognize Negro league records, giving Gibson the second-highest single-season major league batting average at .466 (1943).


title: Josh Gibson

text: Gibson was born in Buena Vista, Georgia, to Mark and Nancy (Woodlock) Gibson and had a younger brother, fellow Negro leaguer Jerry, and sister. In 1923, Gibson moved to Pittsburgh, and his father found work at the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Company. Entering sixth grade in Pittsburgh, Gibson prepared to become an electrician, attending Allegheny Pre-Vocational School and Conroy Pre-Vocational School. His first experience playing baseball for an organized team came at age 16 when he played third base for an amateur team sponsored by Gimbels department store where he found work as an elevator operator. Shortly thereafter, he was recruited by the Pittsburgh Crawfords, which in 1928 were still a semi-professional team. The Crawfords, controlled by Gus Greenlee, were the top black semi-professional team in the Pittsburgh area and would advance to fully professional, major Negro league status by 1931.


title: Josh Gibson

text: In 1928, Gibson met Helen Mason, whom he married on March 7, 1929. When not playing baseball, Gibson continued to work at Gimbels after he had given up on his plans to become an electrician to pursue a baseball career.


title: Josh Gibson

text: In the summer of 1930, the 18-year-old Gibson was picked up by the Memphis Red Sox for a game in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Despite going 2 for 4, Red Sox manager Candy Jim Taylor was not impressed by Gibson and said afterward that he would never be a catcher.


title: Josh Gibson

text: He was then recruited by Cumberland Posey, owner of the Homestead Grays, which were the preeminent Negro league team in Pittsburgh; Gibson debuted with the Grays on July 31, 1930. On August 11, Gibson's wife, pregnant with twins, went into premature labor and died while giving birth to a twin son, Josh Gibson Jr., and daughter, Helen, named after her mother. Helen's parents raised the children.


title: Josh Gibson

text: The Negro leagues generally found it more profitable to schedule relatively few league games and allow the teams to earn extra money through barnstorming against semi-professional and other non-league teams. Thus, it is important to distinguish between records against all competition and records in league games only. For example, against all levels of competition, Gibson hit 69 home runs in 1934; the same year, in 52 league games, he hit 11 home runs.


title: Josh Gibson

text: In 1933, he hit .467 with 55 home runs in 137 games against all levels of competition. His lifetime batting average is said to be higher than .350, with other sources putting it as high as .384, the best in Negro league history. In 2021, it was announced by Major League Baseball that the Negro Leagues (1920–1948) would formally be recognized as a major league. Ongoing research by Baseball Reference tabulated that Gibson led his league three times in batting average and once for all major leagues, most notably hitting .417 in 1937. He also led six times in on-base percentage and slugging percentage eight times.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Gibson's Hall of Fame plaque claims he hit "almost 800 home runs in league and independent baseball during his 17-year career." This figure includes vs. semi-pro competition and in exhibition games. According to the Hall's official data, his lifetime batting average was .359. It was reported that he won nine home run titles and four batting championships playing for the Crawfords and the Grays. It is also believed that Gibson hit a home run in a Negro league game at Yankee Stadium that struck two feet from the top of the wall circling the center field bleachers, about from home plate. Chicago American Giants infielder Jack Marshall said Gibson slugged one over the third deck next to the left-field bullpen in 1934 for the only fair ball hit out of Yankee Stadium. There is no published or film account to support this claim.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith once said that Gibson hit more home runs into Griffith Stadium's distant left field bleachers than the entire American League. A 2020 article published by the Society for American Baseball Research provides the supporting details for his homers in major league parks.


title: Josh Gibson

text: The true statistical achievements of Negro league players may be impossible to know as the Negro leagues did not compile complete statistics or game summaries.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Based on the research of historical accounts performed for the Special Committee on the Negro Leagues, Gibson hit 224 homers in 2,375 at-bats against top black teams, two in 56 at-bats against white major-league pitchers, and 44 in 450 at-bats in the Mexican League. John Holway lists Gibson with the same home run totals and a .351 career average, plus 21-for-56 against white major-league pitchers. According to Holway, Gibson ranks third all-time in the Negro leagues in average among players with 2,000+ at-bats (trailing Jud Wilson by three points and John Beckwith by one). Holway lists him as being second to Mule Suttles in homers, though the all-time leader in HR/AB by a considerable margin — with a homer every 10.6 at-bats to one every 13.6 for runner-up Suttles.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Recent investigations into Negro league statistics, using box scores from newspapers from across the United States, have led to the estimate that, although as many as two-thirds of Negro league team games were played against inferior competition (as traveling exhibition games), Gibson still hit between 150 and 200 home runs in official Negro league games. Though this number appears very conservative next to the claims of "almost 800" to 1,000 home runs, this research also credits Gibson with a rate of one home run every 15.9 at-bats, which compares favorably with the rates of the top nine home run hitters in Major League history. The commonly cited home run totals in excess of 800 are not indicative of his career total in "official" games because the Negro league season was significantly shorter than the Major League season; typically consisting of fewer than 60 games per year. The additional home runs cited were most likely accomplished in "unofficial" games against local and non-Negro league competition of varying strengths, including the oft-cited "barnstorming" competitions.


title: Josh Gibson

text: In nine of his seasons played in the Negro Leagues, he was selected to the East–West All-Star Game twelve times, which included double duty appearances in 1939 (playing at Comiskey Park and Yankee Stadium), 1942 (Yankee Stadium and Griffith Stadium), and 1946 (Griffith and Comiskey).


title: Josh Gibson

text: In early 1943, Gibson fell into a coma and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. After regaining consciousness, he refused the option of surgical removal and lived the next four years with recurring headaches. In 1944, Gibson was hospitalized in Washington, D.C. at Gallinger Hospital for mental observation. On January 20, 1947, Gibson died of a stroke at 35 years old in Pittsburgh. He was buried at the Allegheny Cemetery in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where he lay in an unmarked grave until a small plaque was placed in 1975.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Even though Jackie Robinson became the first black player in modern major league history in April 1947, Larry Doby, who broke the American League color barrier that July, felt that Gibson was the best black player in 1945 and 1946. Doby said in an interview later, "One of the things that was disappointing and disheartening to a lot of the black players at the time was that Jack was not the best player. The best was Josh Gibson. I think that's one of the reasons why Josh died so early — he was heartbroken."


title: Josh Gibson

text: In 1972, Gibson and Buck Leonard became the second and third players, behind Satchel Paige, inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame based on their careers in the Negro leagues. Gibson's Hall of Fame plaque claims "almost 800" home runs for his career, although this number cannot be substantiated.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Although validation of statistics continues to prove difficult for Negro league players, the lack of verifiable figures has led to various amusing tall tales about players such as Gibson. An example of such: In the bottom of the ninth at Pittsburgh, down a run, with a runner on base and two outs, Gibson hits one high and deep, so far into the twilight sky that it disappears, apparently winning the game. The next day, the same two teams are playing again, now in Washington. Just as the teams have positioned themselves on the field, a ball falls out of the sky, and a Washington outfielder grabs it. The umpire yells to Gibson, "You're out! In Pittsburgh, yesterday!"


title: Josh Gibson

text: The U.S. Postal Service issued a 33-cent U.S. commemorative postage stamp which features a painting of Gibson and includes his name.


title: Josh Gibson

text: In 2000, he ranked 18th on "The Sporting News"' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, the highest-ranking of five players to have played all or most of their careers in the Negro leagues. (The others were Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell and Oscar Charleston.) He was nominated as a finalist for the Major League Baseball All-Century Team in the same year.


title: Josh Gibson

text: At PNC Park, home of Pittsburgh's Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise, the Pittsburgh Pirates, an exhibit honoring the city's two Negro league baseball teams was introduced in 2006. Located by the stadium's left field entrance and named Legacy Square, the display featured statues of seven players who competed for the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords, including Gibson. In 2015, without any public announcement, the Pirates removed all seven statues from the Legacy Square area. Ultimately, they were donated to the Josh Gibson Foundation and sold at auction to benefit the Foundation. Most of the statues that were originally located at Legacy Square in PNC Park, including Gibson's, are now displayed at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.


title: Josh Gibson

text: In 2009, a statue of Gibson was installed inside the center field gate of Nationals Park along with ones of Frank Howard and Walter Johnson.


title: Josh Gibson

text: He was named to the Washington Nationals Ring of Honor for his "significant contribution to the game of baseball in Washington, D.C" as part of the Homestead Grays on August 10, 2010.


title: Josh Gibson

text: Ammon Field in Pittsburgh was renamed Josh Gibson Field in his honor and is the site of a Pennsylvania State Historical Marker.


title: Josh Gibson

text: His son, Josh Gibson, Jr., played baseball for the Homestead Grays. His son also was instrumental in the forming of the Josh Gibson Foundation.


title: Josh Gibson

text: An opera based on Josh Gibson's life, "The Summer King", by composer Daniel Sonenberg, premiered on April 29, 2017, in Pittsburgh.


title: Josh Gibson

text: According to the Macmillan "Baseball Encyclopedia", Josh Gibson's Negro official league stats were as follows: Total years played: 16. Total games played: 501. Total career at bats: 1679. Total career hits: 607. Total career 2B hits: 89. Total career 3B hits: 35. Total career HR: 146. Total career SB: 11. Career batting average: .362.


title: Josh Gibson

text: The first official statistics for the Negro leagues were compiled as part of a statistical study sponsored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and supervised by Larry Lester and Dick Clark, in which a research team collected statistics from thousands of boxscores of league-sanctioned games. The first results from this study were the statistics for Negro league Hall of Famers elected prior to 2006, which were published in "Shades of Glory" by Lawrence D. Hogan. These statistics include the official Negro league statistics for Josh Gibson:


title: Paul Tillich

text: Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran Protestant theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Tillich taught at a number of universities in Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1933, where he taught at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, and the University of Chicago.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Among the general public, Tillich is best known for his works "The Courage to Be" (1952) and "Dynamics of Faith" (1957), which introduced issues of theology and culture to a general readership. In academic theology, he is best known for his major three-volume work "Systematic Theology" (1951–63), in which he developed his "method of correlation", an approach that explores the symbols of Christian revelation as answers to the problems of human existence raised by contemporary existential analysis. Unlike mainstream interpretations of existentialism which emphasized the priority of existence over essence, Tillich considered existentialism "possible only as an element in a larger whole, as an element in a vision of the structure of being in its created goodness, and then as a description of man's existence within that framework."


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich's unique integration of essentialism and existentialism, as well as his sustained engagement with ontology in the "Systematic Theology" and other works, has attracted scholarship from a variety of influential thinkers including Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, George Lindbeck, Erich Przywara, Langdon Gilkey, James Luther Adams, Avery Cardinal Dulles, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sallie McFague, Richard John Neuhaus, David Novak, John D. Caputo, Thomas Merton, Robert W. Jenson, Vine Deloria Jr., Thomas F. O'Meara, Fred Buechner and Martin Luther King Jr. According to H. Richard Niebuhr, reading of "Systematic Theology" can be a great voyage of discovery into a rich and deep, and inclusive and yet elaborated, vision and understanding of human life in the presence of the mystery of God." John Herman Randall Jr. lauded the "Systematic Theology" as "beyond doubt the richest, most suggestive, and most challenging philosophical theology our day has produced."


title: Paul Tillich

text: In addition to Tillich's work in theology, he also authored many works in ethics, the philosophy of history, and comparative religion. Tillich's work continues to be studied and discussed around the world, and the North American Paul Tillich Society, Deutsche Paul-Tillich-Gesellschaft, and l'Association Paul Tillich d'expression française regularly host international conferences and seminars on his thought and its possibilities.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the small village of Starzeddel (Starosiedle), Province of Brandenburg, which was then part of Germany. He was the oldest of three children, with two sisters: Johanna (born 1888, died 1920) and Elisabeth (born 1893). Tillich's Prussian father Johannes Tillich was a conservative Lutheran pastor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces; his mother Mathilde Dürselen was from the Rhineland and more liberal.


title: Paul Tillich

text: When Tillich was four, his father became superintendent of a diocese in Bad Schönfliess (now Trzcińsko-Zdrój, Poland), a town of three thousand, where Tillich began primary school (""). In 1898, Tillich was sent to Königsberg in der Neumark (now Chojna, Poland) to begin his "gymnasium" schooling. He was billeted in a boarding house and experienced a loneliness that he sought to overcome by reading the Bible while encountering humanistic ideas at school.


title: Paul Tillich

text: In 1900, Tillich's father was transferred to Berlin, resulting in Tillich's switching in 1901 to a Berlin school, from which he graduated in 1904. Before his graduation, however, his mother died of cancer in September 1903, when Tillich was 17. Tillich attended several universities — the University of Berlin beginning in 1904, the University of Tübingen in 1905, and the University of Halle-Wittenberg from 1905 to 1907. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Breslau in 1911 and his Licentiate of Theology degree at Halle-Wittenberg in 1912. His PhD dissertation at Breslau was "The Conception of the History of Religion in Schelling's Positive Philosophy: Its Presuppositions and Principles".


title: Paul Tillich

text: During his time at university, he became a member of the Wingolf Christian fraternity in Berlin, Tübingen and Halle.


title: Paul Tillich

text: That same year, 1912, Tillich was ordained as a Lutheran minister in the Province of Brandenburg. On 28 September 1914 he married Margarethe ("Grethi") Wever (1888–1968), and in October he joined the Imperial German Army as a chaplain during World War I. Grethi deserted Tillich in 1919 after an affair that produced a child not fathered by Tillich; the two then divorced. During the war, Tillich served as a chaplain in the trenches, burying his closest friend and numerous soldiers in the mud of France. He was hospitalized three times for combat trauma, and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery under fire. He came home from the war shattered. Tillich's academic career began after the war; he became a Privatdozent of Theology at the University of Berlin, a post he held from 1919 to 1924. On his return from the war he had met Hannah Werner-Gottschow, then married and pregnant. In March 1924 they married; it was the second marriage for both. She later wrote a book entitled "From Time to Time" about their life together, which included their commitment to open marriage, upsetting to some; despite this, they remained together into old age.


title: Paul Tillich

text: From 1924 to 1925, Tillich served as an Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Marburg, where he began to develop his systematic theology, teaching a course on it during the last of his three terms. While at Marburg, Tillich developed a professional relationship with both Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Heidegger. From 1925 until 1929, Tillich was a Professor of Theology at the Dresden University of Technology and the University of Leipzig. Then, succeeding Max Scheler (who had died suddenly in 1928), Tillich held the post of "Professor of Philosophy and Sociology" at the University of Frankfurt from 1929 to 1933. While at Frankfurt Tillich’s two assistants (both completing their doctorates under him) were Harald Poelchau and Theodor Adorno (in 1931 Leo Strauss had applied for the same position but was rejected). During that period Tillich also “was instrumental in hiring Max Horkheimer as the Director of the Institut fr Sozialforschung and to a professorship in sociology at the University of Frankfurt.” In Winter Term 1930-31 Tillich and Horkheimer together team-taught a course on John Locke; and during the several terms to immediately follow Tillich and Adorno together led seminars on Georg Simmel, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Along the way Tillich also remained in conversation with Erich Przywara.


title: Paul Tillich

text: While at the University of Frankfurt, Tillich traveled throughout Germany giving public lectures and speeches that brought him into conflict with the Nazi movement. Ten weeks after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor, on 13 April 1933 Tillich, along with Karl Mannheim and Max Horkheimer, were among the “first batch” of prominent German academic “enemies of the Reich” to be summarily dismissed from their tenured positions for solely ideological and/or racial reasons. Reinhold Niebuhr visited Germany in the summer of 1933 and, already impressed with Tillich's writings (in fact they had known one another since 1919), contacted Tillich upon learning of his dismissal. Niebuhr urged Tillich to join the faculty at New York City's Union Theological Seminary; Tillich accepted.


title: Paul Tillich

text: At the age of 47, Tillich moved with his family to the United States. This meant learning English, the language in which he would eventually publish works such as the "Systematic Theology". From 1933 until 1955 he taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he began as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy of Religion. During 1933–34 he was also a Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at Columbia University. Remarkably, “the faculty of Union [had] agreed to a 5% pay cut, at the height of the Great Depression, to bring the 47-year old Tillich and his family to the U.S.”


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich acquired tenure at the Union Theological Seminary in 1937, and in 1940 he was promoted to Professor of Philosophical Theology and became an American citizen.


title: Paul Tillich

text: At Union, Tillich earned his reputation, publishing a series of books that outlined his idiosyncratic synthesis of Protestant Christian theology and existential philosophy. He published "On the Boundary" in 1936; "The Protestant Era", a collection of his essays, in 1948; and "The Shaking of the Foundations", the first of three volumes of his sermons, also in 1948. His collections of sermons gave him a broader audience than he had yet experienced.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich's most heralded achievements, though, were the 1951 publication of volume one of the "Systematic Theology" (University of Chicago Press), and the 1952 publication of "The Courage to Be" (Yale University Press). The first volume of the systematic theology examines the inner tensions in the structure of reason and being, primarily through a study in ontology. These tensions, Tillich contends, show that the quest for revelation is implied in finite reason, and that the quest for the ground of being is implied in finite being. The publication of "Systematic Theology, Vol. 1" brought Tillich international academic acclaim, prompting an invitation to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1953–54 at the University of Aberdeen. "The Courage to Be", which examines ontic, moral, and spiritual anxieties across history and in modernity, was based on Tillich's 1950 Dwight H. Terry Lectureship and reached a wide general readership.


title: Paul Tillich

text: These works led to an appointment at Harvard Divinity School in 1955, where he was University Professor, among the (at the time) five highest ranking professors at Harvard. He was primarily a professor of undergraduates, because Harvard did not have a department of religion for them, but was thereby more exposed to the wider university and "most fully embodied the ideal of a University Professor." In 1959, Tillich was featured on the cover of "Time" magazine.


title: Paul Tillich

text: In 1961, Tillich became one of the founding members of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture, an organization with which he maintained ties for the remainder of his life. During this period, he published volume two of the "Systematic Theology", as well as the popular book "Dynamics of Faith", both in 1957. Tillich's career at Harvard lasted until 1962, when he was appointed John Nuveen Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago. He remained at Chicago until his death in 1965.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Volume three of Tillich's "Systematic Theology" was published in 1963. In 1964, Tillich became the first theologian to be honored in Kegley and Bretall's "Library of Living Theology": "The adjective 'great,' in our opinion, can be applied to very few thinkers of our time, but Tillich, we are far from alone in believing, stands unquestionably amongst these few." A widely quoted critical assessment of his importance was Georgia Harkness' comment: "What Whitehead was to American philosophy, Tillich has been to American theology."


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich died on October 22, 1965, ten days after having a heart attack. In 1966, his ashes were interred in the Paul Tillich Park in New Harmony, Indiana. His gravestone inscription reads: "And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit for his season, his leaf also shall not wither. And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper." (Psalm 1:3)


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich used the concept of being ("Sein") throughout his philosophical and theological work. Some of his work engaged with the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich's preliminary analysis of being ascends from the human subject's asking of the ontological question ("What is being itself?"), upwards to the highest categories of metaphysics. He distinguishes among four levels of ontological analysis: self-world; dynamics and form, freedom and destiny, and individualization and participation; essential being and existential being; and time, space, causality, and substance.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Being plays a key role throughout Tillich's "Systematic Theology". In the opening to the second volume, Tillich writes:


title: Paul Tillich

text: Throughout most of his work Tillich provides an ontological view of God as being-itself, the ground of being, and the power of being, one in which God is beyond essence and existence. He was critical of conceptions of God as a being (e.g., the highest being), as well as of pantheistic conceptions of God as universal essence. Traditional medieval philosophical theology in the work of figures such as St. Anselm, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham tended to understand God as the highest existing being, to which predicates such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, goodness, righteousness, holiness, etc. may be ascribed. Arguments for and against the existence of God presuppose such an understanding of God. Tillich is critical of this mode of discourse, which he refers to as "theological theism," and argues that if God is a being, even if the highest being, God cannot be properly called the source of all being. With respect to both God's existence and essence, moreover, Tillich shows how difficulties beset Thomas Aquinas' attempt to "maintain the truth that God is beyond essence and existence while simultaneously arguing for the existence of God."


title: Paul Tillich

text: Though Tillich is critical of propositional arguments for the existence of God as found in natural theology, as he considers them objectifying of God, he nonetheless affirms the reality of God as the ground of being. A similar line of thought is found in the work of Eric Voegelin. Tillich's concept of God can be drawn out from his analysis of being. In Tillich's analysis of being, all of being experiences the threat of nonbeing. Yet, following Heidegger, Tillich claims that it is human beings alone who can raise the question of being and therefore of being-itself. This is because, he contends, human beings' "infinite self-transcendence is an expression of [their] belonging to that which is beyond nonbeing, namely, to being-itself ... Being-itself manifests itself to finite being in the infinite drive of the finite beyond itself."


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich addresses questions both ontological and personalist concerning God. One issue deals with whether and in what way personal language about the nature of God and humanity's relationship to God is appropriate. In distinction to "theological theism", Tillich refers to another kind of theism as that of the "divine-human encounter". Such is the theism of the encounter with the "Wholly Other" ("Das ganz Andere"), as in the work of Karl Barth and Rudolf Otto. It implies a personalism with regard to God's self-revelation. Tillich is quite clear that this is both appropriate and necessary, as it is the basis of the personalism of biblical religion altogether and of the concept of the "Word of God", but can become falsified if the theologian tries to turn such encounters with God as the Wholly Other into an understanding of God as a being. In other words, God is both personal and transpersonal.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich's ontological view of God has precedent in Christian theology. In addition to affinities with the concept of God as being-itself in classical theism, it shares similarities with Hellenistic and Patristic conceptions of God as the "unoriginate source" ("agennetos") of all being. This view was espoused in particular by Origen, one of a number of early theologians whose thought influenced Tillich's. Their views in turn had pre-Christian precedents in middle Platonism. Aside from classical and Christian influences in Tillich's concept of God, there is a dynamism in Tillich's notion of "the living God," reflecting some influence from Spinoza.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich combines his ontological conception of God with a largely existential and phenomenological understanding of faith in God, remarking that God is "the answer to the question implied in man's finitude ... the name for that which concerns man ultimately." This is notably manifest in his understanding of faith as ultimate concern. Following his existential analysis, Tillich further argues that theological theism is not only logically problematic, but is unable to speak into the situation of radical doubt and despair about meaning in life. This issue, he said, was of primary concern in the modern age, as opposed to anxiety about fate, guilt, death and condemnation. This is because the state of finitude entails by necessity anxiety, and that it is our finitude as human beings, our being a mixture of being and nonbeing, that is at the ultimate basis of anxiety. If God is not the ground of being, then God cannot provide an answer to the question of finitude; God would also be finite in some sense. The term "God Above God," then, means to indicate the God who appears, who is the ground of being, when the "God" of theological theism has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. While on the one hand this God goes beyond the God of theism as usually defined, it finds expression in many religious symbols of the Christian faith, particularly that of the crucified Christ. The possibility thus exists, says Tillich, that religious symbols may be recovered which would otherwise have been rendered ineffective by contemporary society.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich argues that the God of theological theism is at the root of much revolt against theism and religious faith in the modern period. Tillich states, sympathetically, that the God of theological theism


title: Paul Tillich

text: Another reason Tillich criticized theological theism was because it placed God into the subject-object dichotomy. The subject-object dichotomy is the basic distinction made in epistemology. Epistemologically, God cannot be made into an object, that is, an object of the knowing subject. Tillich deals with this question under the rubric of the relationality of God. The question is "whether there are external relations between God and the creature". Traditionally Christian theology has always understood the doctrine of creation to mean precisely this external relationality between God, the Creator, and the creature as separate and not identical realities. Tillich reminds us of the point, which can be found in Luther, that "there is no place to which man can withdraw from the divine thou, because it includes the ego and is nearer to the ego than the ego to itself".


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich goes further to say that the desire to draw God into the subject–object dichotomy is an "insult" to the divine holiness. Similarly, if God were made into the subject rather than the object of knowledge (The Ultimate Subject), then the rest of existing entities then become subjected to the absolute knowledge and scrutiny of God, and the human being is "reified," or made into a mere object. It would deprive the person of his or her own subjectivity and creativity. According to Tillich, theological theism has provoked the rebellions found in atheism and Existentialism, although other social factors such as the industrial revolution have also contributed to the "reification" of the human being. The modern man could no longer tolerate the idea of being an "object" completely subjected to the absolute knowledge of God. Tillich argued, as mentioned, that theological theism is "bad theology".


title: Paul Tillich

text: Alternatively, Tillich presents the above-mentioned ontological view of God as Being-Itself, Ground of Being, Power of Being, and occasionally as Abyss or God's "Abysmal Being". What makes Tillich's ontological view of God different from theological theism is that it transcends it by being the foundation or ultimate reality that "precedes" all beings. Just as Being for Heidegger is ontologically "prior" to conception, Tillich views God to be beyond being. God is not a supernatural entity among other entities. Instead, God is the inexhaustible ground which empowers the existence of beings. We cannot perceive God as an object which is related to a subject because God "precedes" the subject–object dichotomy.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Thus Tillich dismisses a literalistic Biblicism. Instead of rejecting the notion of personal God, however, Tillich sees it as a symbol that points directly to the Ground of Being. Since the Ground of Being ontologically precedes reason, it cannot be comprehended since comprehension presupposes the subject–object dichotomy. Tillich disagreed with any literal philosophical and religious statements that can be made about God. Such literal statements attempt to define God and lead not only to anthropomorphism but also to a philosophical mistake that Immanuel Kant warned against, that setting limits against the transcendent inevitably leads to contradictions. Any statements about God are simply symbolic, but these symbols are sacred in the sense that they function to participate or point to the Ground of Being.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich also further elaborated the thesis of the God above the God of theism in his Systematic Theology.


title: Paul Tillich

text: The key to understanding Tillich's theology is what he calls the "method of correlation." It is an approach that correlates insights from Christian revelation with the issues raised by existential, psychological, and philosophical analyses.


title: Paul Tillich

text: For Tillich, the existential questions of human existence are associated with the field of philosophy and, more specifically, ontology (the study of being). This is because, according to Tillich, a lifelong pursuit of philosophy reveals that the central question of every philosophical inquiry always comes back to the question of being, or what it means to be, and, consequently, what it means to be a finite human being within being. To be correlated with existential questions are theological answers, themselves derived from Christian revelation. The task of the philosopher primarily involves developing the questions, whereas the task of the theologian primarily involves developing the answers to these questions. However, it should be remembered that the two tasks overlap and include one another: the theologian must be somewhat of a philosopher and vice versa, for Tillich's notion of faith as "ultimate concern" necessitates that the theological answer be correlated with, compatible with, and in response to the general ontological question which must be developed independently from the answers. Thus, on one side of the correlation lies an ontological analysis of the human situation, whereas on the other is a presentation of the Christian message as a response to this existential dilemma. For Tillich, no formulation of the question can contradict the theological answer. This is because the Christian message claims, "a priori", that the "logos" "who became flesh" is also the universal "logos" of the Greeks.


title: Paul Tillich

text: In addition to the intimate relationship between philosophy and theology, another important aspect of the method of correlation is Tillich's distinction between form and content in the theological answers. While the nature of revelation determines the actual content of the theological answers, the character of the questions determines the form of these answers. This is because, for Tillich, theology must be an answering theology, or apologetic theology. God is called the "ground of being" in part because God is the answer to the ontological threat of non-being, and this characterization of the theological answer in philosophical terms means that the answer has been conditioned (insofar as its form is considered) by the question. Throughout the "Systematic Theology", Tillich is careful to maintain this distinction between form and content without allowing one to be inadvertently conditioned by the other. Many criticisms of Tillich's methodology revolve around this issue of whether the integrity of the Christian message is really maintained when its form is conditioned by philosophy.


title: Paul Tillich

text: The theological answer is also determined by the sources of theology, our experience, and the norm of theology. Though the form of the theological answers are determined by the character of the question, these answers (which "are contained in the revelatory events on which Christianity is based") are also "taken by systematic theology from the sources, through the medium, under the norm." There are three main sources of systematic theology: the Bible, Church history, and the history of religion and culture. Experience is not a source but a medium through which the sources speak. And the norm of theology is that by which both sources and experience are judged with regard to the content of the Christian faith. Thus, we have the following as elements of the method and structure of systematic theology:


title: Paul Tillich

text: As McKelway explains, the sources of theology contribute to the formation of the norm, which then becomes the criterion through which the sources and experience are judged. The relationship is circular, as it is the present situation which conditions the norm in the interaction between church and biblical message. The norm is then subject to change, but Tillich insists that its basic content remains the same: that of the biblical message. It is tempting to conflate revelation with the norm, but we must keep in mind that revelation (whether original or dependent) is not an element of the structure of systematic theology per se, but an event. For Tillich, the present-day norm is the "New Being in Jesus as the Christ as our Ultimate Concern". This is because the present question is one of estrangement, and the overcoming of this estrangement is what Tillich calls the "New Being". But since Christianity answers the question of estrangement with "Jesus as the Christ", the norm tells us that we find the New Being in Jesus as the Christ.


title: Paul Tillich

text: There is also the question of the validity of the method of correlation. Certainly one could reject the method on the grounds that there is no "a priori" reason for its adoption. But Tillich claims that the method of any theology and its system are interdependent. That is, an absolute methodological approach cannot be adopted because the method is continually being determined by the system and the objects of theology.


title: Paul Tillich

text: This is part four of Tillich's "Systematic Theology". In this part, Tillich talks about life and the divine Spirit.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich stated the courage to take meaninglessness into oneself presupposes a relation to the ground of being: absolute faith. Absolute faith can transcend the theistic idea of God, and has three elements.


title: Paul Tillich

text: According to the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", Tillich believes the essence of religious attitudes is what he calls "ultimate concern". Separate from all profane and ordinary realities, the object of the concern is understood as sacred, numinous or holy. The perception of its reality is felt as so overwhelming and valuable that all else seems insignificant, and for this reason requires total surrender. In 1957, Tillich defined his conception of faith more explicitly in his work, "Dynamics of Faith".


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich further refined his conception of faith by stating that, "Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It is the most centered act of the human mind ... it participates in the dynamics of personal life."


title: Paul Tillich

text: An arguably central component of Tillich's concept of faith is his notion that faith is "ecstatic". That is to say:


title: Paul Tillich

text: In short, for Tillich, faith does not stand opposed to rational or nonrational elements (reason and emotion respectively), as some philosophers would maintain. Rather, it "transcends" them in an ecstatic passion for the ultimate.


title: Paul Tillich

text: It should also be noted that Tillich does not exclude atheists in his exposition of faith. Everyone has an ultimate concern, and this concern can be in an act of faith, "even if the act of faith includes the denial of God. Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God"


title: Paul Tillich

text: In Paul Tillich's work "The Courage to Be" he defines courage as the self-affirmation of one's being in spite of a threat of nonbeing. He relates courage to anxiety, anxiety being the threat of non-being and the courage to be what we use to combat that threat. For Tillich, he outlines three types of anxiety and thus three ways to display the courage to be.


title: Paul Tillich

text: a. The Anxiety of Fate and Death is the most basic and universal form of anxiety for Tillich. It relates quite simply to the recognition of our mortality. This troubles us humans. We become anxious when we are unsure whether our actions create a causal damnation which leads to a very real and quite unavoidable death (42-44). "Nonbeing threatens man's ontic self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death" (41).


title: Paul Tillich

text: b. We display courage when we cease to rely on others to tell us what will come of us, (what will happen when we die etc.) and begin seeking those answers out for ourselves. Called the "courage of confidence" (162-63).


title: Paul Tillich

text: a. This anxiety afflicts our moral self-affirmation. We as humans are responsible for our moral being, and when asked by our judge (whomever that may be) what we have made of ourselves we must answer. The anxiety is produced when we realize our being is unsatisfactory. "It [Nonbeing] threatens man's moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of guilt, absolutely in terms of condemnation" (41).


title: Paul Tillich

text: b. We display courage when we first identify our sin; despair or whatever is causing us guilt or afflicting condemnation. We then rely on the idea that we are accepted regardless. "The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable" (164).


title: Paul Tillich

text: a. The Anxiety of Meaninglessness and Emptiness attacks our being as a whole. We worry about the loss of an ultimate concern or goal. This anxiety is also brought on by a loss of spirituality. We as beings feel the threat of non-being when we feel we have no place or purpose in the world. "It [Nonbeing] threatens man's spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of emptiness, absolutely in terms of meaninglessness" (41).


title: Paul Tillich

text: b. We display the courage to be when facing this anxiety by displaying true faith, and by again, self-affirming oneself. We draw from the "power of being" which is God for Tillich and use that faith to in turn affirm ourselves and negate the non-being. We can find our meaning and purpose through the "power of being" (172-73).


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich writes that the ultimate source of the courage to be is the "God above God," which transcends the theistic idea of God and is the content of absolute faith (defined as "the accepting of the acceptance without somebody or something that accepts") (185).


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich espoused socialist politics, and became involved in religious socialist circles after World War I. He co-wrote a pamphlet in 1919 which advocated that Christian leaders with socialist leanings should "enter into the socialist movement in order to pave the way for a future union of Christianity and the socialist social order". The Fellowship of Socialist Christians was organized in the early 1930s by Reinhold Niebuhr and others with similar views.


title: Paul Tillich

text: The main supporters of the Fellowship in the early days included Tillich, Eduard Heimann, Sherwood Eddy and Rose Terlin.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Although not Communist, the group acknowledged Karl Marx's social philosophy. Tillich was sympathetic towards the young Marx's theory of alienation as well as his idea of historical materialism, but was opposed to rigid understandings of historical determinism that claimed the victory of socialism was inevitable, as espoused by many vulgar Marxists.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich's book "The Socialist Decision" was published in the early 1930s, during the rise of Nazism, and it was immediately censored by the Nazi regime. In the book, Tillich characterised Nazism as a form of political romanticism, which he defined as an attachment to a "myth of origin (that) envisions the beginnings of humankind in elemental, superhuman figures of various kinds" that he contended formed the basis for right-wing politics more generally. Tillich identified three basic origin myths in romantic politics: blood, soil and social group. He argued that these origin myths served to legitimate established social hierarchies by idealising the past and promoting a cyclical view of history that denied the possibility of progress and enlightened reform: "the origin (myth) embodies the law of cyclical motion: whatever proceeds from it must return to it. Wherever the origin is in control, nothing new can happen". He also contended that whilst political romanticism could be critical of capitalism and industrial society, it could still be used by the capitalist class to advance their interests. Tillich more precisely described Nazism as form of revolutionary romanticism, which he counterposed to conservative romanticism. He stated that whilst the latter "defend(s) the spiritual and social residues of the bond of origin... and whenever possible (seeks) to restore past forms", the former "tries to gain a basis for new ties to the origin by a devastating attack on the rational system".


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich viewed liberalism as intertwined with capitalism, arguing that it granted freedom to the capitalist class without liberating the masses, and believing it had a key role in dismantling traditional social bonds, including religious ones, as well as advancing colonialism and slavery. However, he was positive about liberalism's individualism, rationalism and egalitarianism, and believed that it was inseparable from democracy, despite tensions between the two. He considered that the connection between liberalism and capitalism needed to be severed in order for liberalism's aspirations for freedom to be realised, advocating for an embrace of democratic socialism as an alternative.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Two of Tillich's works, "The Courage to Be" (1952) and "Dynamics of Faith" (1957), were read widely, including by people who would not normally read religious books. In "The Courage to Be", he lists three basic anxieties: anxiety about our biological finitude, i.e. that arising from the knowledge that we will eventually die; anxiety about our moral finitude, linked to guilt; and anxiety about our existential finitude, a sense of aimlessness in life. Tillich related these to three different historical eras: the early centuries of the Christian era; the Reformation; and the 20th century. Tillich's popular works have influenced psychology as well as theology, having had an influence on Rollo May, whose "The Courage to Create" was inspired by "The Courage to Be".


title: Paul Tillich

text: Today, Tillich's most observable legacy may well be that of a spiritually-oriented public intellectual and teacher with a broad and continuing range of influence. Tillich's chapel sermons (especially at Union) were enthusiastically received (Tillich was known as the only faculty member of his day at Union willing to attend the revivals of Billy Graham). Tillich's students have commented on Tillich's approachability as a lecturer and his need for interaction with his audience. When Tillich was University Professor at Harvard, he was chosen as keynote speaker from among an auspicious gathering of many who had appeared on the cover of Time Magazine during its first four decades. Tillich along with his student, psychologist Rollo May, was an early leader at the Esalen Institute. Contemporary New Age catchphrases describing God (spatially) as the "Ground of Being" and (temporally) as the "Eternal Now," in tandem with the view that God is not an entity among entities but rather is "Being-Itself"—notions which Eckhart Tolle, for example, has invoked repeatedly throughout his career—were paradigmatically renovated by Tillich, although of course these ideas derive from Christian mystical sources as well as from ancient and medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.


title: Paul Tillich

text: The introductory philosophy course taught by the person Tillich considered to be his best student, John Edwin Smith, "probably turned more undergraduates to the study of philosophy at Yale than all the other philosophy courses put together. His courses in philosophy of religion and American philosophy defined those fields for many years. Perhaps most important of all, he has educated a younger generation in the importance of the public life in philosophy and in how to practice philosophy publicly." In the 1980s and 1990s the Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion, a leading forum dedicated to the revival of the American public tradition of philosophy and religion, flourished under the leadership of Tillich's student and expositor Leroy S. Rouner. A consideration of Tillich's own traumatic experiences as an active duty chaplain during World War I have recently led some to view his theology as "Post-traumatic." The book "Post-Traumatic God: How the Church Cares for People Who Have Been to Hell and Back" explores Tillich's experiences and theology to offer people afflicted with post-traumatic stress an understanding of God aimed at helping them heal.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Martin Buber's disciple Malcolm Diamond claims Tillich's approach indicates a "transtheistic position that Buber seeks to avoid", reducing God to the impersonal "necessary being" of Thomas Aquinas.


title: Paul Tillich

text: Tillich has been criticized from the Barthian wing of Protestantism for what is alleged to be correlation theory's tendency to reduce God and his relationship to man to anthropocentric terms. Tillich counters that Barth's approach to theology denies the "possibility of understanding God's relation to man in any other way than heteronomously or extrinsically". Defenders of Tillich claim that critics misunderstand the distinction Tillich makes between God's essence as the unconditional ("das unbedingte") "Ground of Being" which is unknowable, and how God reveals himself to mankind in existence. Tillich establishes the distinction in the first chapter of his "Systematic Theology Volume One:" "But though God in his abysmal nature <nowiki>[</nowiki>"footnote: 'Calvin: in his essence' " <nowiki>]</nowiki> is in no way dependent on man, God in his self manifestation to man is dependent on the way man receives his manifestation."


title: Paul Tillich

text: Some conservative strains of Evangelical Christianity believe Tillich's thought is too unorthodox to qualify as Christianity at all, but rather as a form of pantheism or atheism. The "Evangelical Dictionary of Theology" states, "At best Tillich was a pantheist, but his thought borders on atheism." Defenders of Tillich counter such claims by pointing to clear monotheistic articulations, from a classical Christian viewpoint, of the relationship between God and man, such as his description of the experience of grace in his sermon "You Are Accepted".


title: Value at risk

text: Value at risk (VaR) is a measure of the risk of loss for investments. It estimates how much a set of investments might lose (with a given probability), given normal market conditions, in a set time period such as a day. VaR is typically used by firms and regulators in the financial industry to gauge the amount of assets needed to cover possible losses.


title: Value at risk

text: For a given portfolio, time horizon, and probability "p", the "p" VaR can be defined informally as the maximum possible loss during that time after excluding all worse outcomes whose combined probability is at most "p". This assumes mark-to-market pricing, and no trading in the portfolio.


title: Value at risk

text: For example, if a portfolio of stocks has a one-day 95% VaR of $1 million, that means that there is a 0.05 probability that the portfolio will fall in value by more than $1 million over a one-day period if there is no trading. Informally, a loss of $1 million or more on this portfolio is expected on 1 day out of 20 days (because of 5% probability).


title: Value at risk

text: More formally, "p" VaR is defined such that the probability of a loss greater than VaR is (at most) "(1-p)" while the probability of a loss less than VaR is (at least) "p". A loss which exceeds the VaR threshold is termed a "VaR breach".


title: Value at risk

text: It is important to note that, for a fixed "p", the "p" VaR does not assess the magnitude of loss when a VaR breach occurs and therefore is considered by some to be a questionable metric for risk management. For instance, assume someone makes a bet that flipping a coin seven times will not give seven heads. The terms are that they win $100 if this does not happen (with probability 127/128) and lose $12,700 if it does (with probability 1/128). That is, the possible loss amounts are $0 or $12,700. The 1% VaR is then $0, because the probability of any loss at all is 1/128 which is less than 1%. They are, however, exposed to a possible loss of $12,700 which can be expressed as the "p" VaR for any "p ≤ 0.78125% (1/128)".


title: Value at risk

text: VaR has four main uses in finance: risk management, financial control, financial reporting and computing regulatory capital. VaR is sometimes used in non-financial applications as well. However, it is a controversial risk management tool.


title: Value at risk

text: Important related ideas are economic capital, backtesting, stress testing, expected shortfall, and tail conditional expectation.


title: Value at risk

text: Common parameters for VaR are 1% and 5% probabilities and one day and two week horizons, although other combinations are in use.


title: Value at risk

text: The reason for assuming normal markets and no trading, and to restricting loss to things measured in daily accounts, is to make the loss observable. In some extreme financial events it can be impossible to determine losses, either because market prices are unavailable or because the loss-bearing institution breaks up. Some longer-term consequences of disasters, such as lawsuits, loss of market confidence and employee morale and impairment of brand names can take a long time to play out, and may be hard to allocate among specific prior decisions. VaR marks the boundary between normal days and extreme events. Institutions can lose far more than the VaR amount; all that can be said is that they will not do so very often.


title: Value at risk

text: The probability level is about equally often specified as one minus the probability of a VaR break, so that the VaR in the example above would be called a one-day 95% VaR instead of one-day 5% VaR. This generally does not lead to confusion because the probability of VaR breaks is almost always small, certainly less than 50%.


title: Value at risk

text: Although it virtually always represents a loss, VaR is conventionally reported as a positive number. A negative VaR would imply the portfolio has a high probability of making a profit, for example a one-day 5% VaR of negative implies the portfolio has a 95% chance of making more than over the next day.


title: Value at risk

text: Another inconsistency is that VaR is sometimes taken to refer to profit-and-loss at the end of the period, and sometimes as the maximum loss at any point during the period. The original definition was the latter, but in the early 1990s when VaR was aggregated across trading desks and time zones, end-of-day valuation was the only reliable number so the former became the "de facto" definition. As people began using multiday VaRs in the second half of the 1990s, they almost always estimated the distribution at the end of the period only. It is also easier theoretically to deal with a point-in-time estimate versus a maximum over an interval. Therefore, the end-of-period definition is the most common both in theory and practice today.


title: Value at risk

text: The definition of VaR is nonconstructive; it specifies a property VaR must have, but not how to compute VaR. Moreover, there is wide scope for interpretation in the definition. This has led to two broad types of VaR, one used primarily in risk management and the other primarily for risk measurement. The distinction is not sharp, however, and hybrid versions are typically used in financial control, financial reporting and computing regulatory capital.


title: Value at risk

text: To a risk manager, VaR is a system, not a number. The system is run periodically (usually daily) and the published number is compared to the computed price movement in opening positions over the time horizon. There is never any subsequent adjustment to the published VaR, and there is no distinction between VaR breaks caused by input errors (including IT breakdowns, fraud and rogue trading), computation errors (including failure to produce a VaR on time) and market movements.


title: Value at risk

text: A frequentist claim is made that the long-term frequency of VaR breaks will equal the specified probability, within the limits of sampling error, and that the VaR breaks will be independent in time and independent of the level of VaR. This claim is validated by a backtest, a comparison of published VaRs to actual price movements. In this interpretation, many different systems could produce VaRs with equally good backtests, but wide disagreements on daily VaR values.


title: Value at risk

text: For risk measurement a number is needed, not a system. A Bayesian probability claim is made that given the information and beliefs at the time, the subjective probability of a VaR break was the specified level. VaR is adjusted after the fact to correct errors in inputs and computation, but not to incorporate information unavailable at the time of computation. In this context, "backtest" has a different meaning. Rather than comparing published VaRs to actual market movements over the period of time the system has been in operation, VaR is retroactively computed on scrubbed data over as long a period as data are available and deemed relevant. The same position data and pricing models are used for computing the VaR as determining the price movements.


title: Value at risk

text: Although some of the sources listed here treat only one kind of VaR as legitimate, most of the recent ones seem to agree that risk management VaR is superior for making short-term and tactical decisions in the present, while risk measurement VaR should be used for understanding the past, and making medium term and strategic decisions for the future. When VaR is used for financial control or financial reporting it should incorporate elements of both. For example, if a trading desk is held to a VaR limit, that is both a risk-management rule for deciding what risks to allow today, and an input into the risk measurement computation of the desk's risk-adjusted return at the end of the reporting period.


title: Value at risk

text: VaR can also be applied to governance of endowments, trusts, and pension plans. Essentially, trustees adopt portfolio Values-at-Risk metrics for the entire pooled account and the diversified parts individually managed. Instead of probability estimates they simply define maximum levels of acceptable loss for each. Doing so provides an easy metric for oversight and adds accountability as managers are then directed to manage, but with the additional constraint to avoid losses within a defined risk parameter. VaR utilized in this manner adds relevance as well as an easy way to monitor risk measurement control far more intuitive than Standard Deviation of Return. Use of VaR in this context, as well as a worthwhile critique on board governance practices as it relates to investment management oversight in general can be found in "Best Practices in Governance."


title: Value at risk

text: Let formula_1 be a profit and loss distribution (loss negative and profit positive). The VaR at level formula_2 is the smallest number formula_3 such that the probability that formula_4 does not exceed formula_3 is at least formula_6. Mathematically, formula_7 is the formula_8-quantile of formula_9, i.e.,


title: Value at risk

text: This is the most general definition of VaR and the two identities are equivalent (indeed, for any real random variable formula_1 its cumulative distribution function formula_12 is well defined).


title: Value at risk

text: However this formula cannot be used directly for calculations unless we assume that formula_1 has some parametric distribution.


title: Value at risk

text: Risk managers typically assume that some fraction of the bad events will have undefined losses, either because markets are closed or illiquid, or because the entity bearing the loss breaks apart or loses the ability to compute accounts. Therefore, they do not accept results based on the assumption of a well-defined probability distribution. Nassim Taleb has labeled this assumption, "charlatanism". On the other hand, many academics prefer to assume a well-defined distribution, albeit usually one with fat tails. This point has probably caused more contention among VaR theorists than any other.


title: Value at risk

text: Value of Risks can also be written as a distortion risk measure given by the distortion function formula_14


title: Value at risk

text: The term "VaR" is used both for a risk measure and a risk metric. This sometimes leads to confusion. Sources earlier than 1995 usually emphasize the risk measure, later sources are more likely to emphasize the metric.


title: Value at risk

text: The VaR risk measure defines risk as mark-to-market loss on a fixed portfolio over a fixed time horizon. There are many alternative risk measures in finance. Given the inability to use mark-to-market (which uses market prices to define loss) for future performance, loss is often defined (as a substitute) as change in fundamental value. For example, if an institution holds a loan that declines in market price because interest rates go up, but has no change in cash flows or credit quality, some systems do not recognize a loss. Also some try to incorporate the economic cost of harm not measured in daily financial statements, such as loss of market confidence or employee morale, impairment of brand names or lawsuits.


title: Value at risk

text: Rather than assuming a static portfolio over a fixed time horizon, some risk measures incorporate the dynamic effect of expected trading (such as a stop loss order) and consider the expected holding period of positions.


title: Value at risk

text: The VaR risk metric summarizes the distribution of possible losses by a quantile, a point with a specified probability of greater losses. A common alternative metrics is expected shortfall.


title: Value at risk

text: Supporters of VaR-based risk management claim the first and possibly greatest benefit of VaR is the improvement in systems and modeling it forces on an institution. In 1997, Philippe Jorion wrote:[T]he greatest benefit of VAR lies in the imposition of a structured methodology for critically thinking about risk. Institutions that go through the process of computing their VAR are forced to confront their exposure to financial risks and to set up a proper risk management function. Thus the process of getting to VAR may be as important as the number itself.


title: Value at risk

text: Publishing a daily number, on-time and with specified statistical properties holds every part of a trading organization to a high objective standard. Robust backup systems and default assumptions must be implemented. Positions that are reported, modeled or priced incorrectly stand out, as do data feeds that are inaccurate or late and systems that are too-frequently down. Anything that affects profit and loss that is left out of other reports will show up either in inflated VaR or excessive VaR breaks. "A risk-taking institution that "does not" compute VaR might escape disaster, but an institution that "cannot" compute VaR will not."


title: Value at risk

text: The second claimed benefit of VaR is that it separates risk into two regimes. Inside the VaR limit, conventional statistical methods are reliable. Relatively short-term and specific data can be used for analysis. Probability estimates are meaningful because there are enough data to test them. In a sense, there is no true risk because these are a sum of many independent observations with a left bound on the outcome. For example, a casino does not worry about whether red or black will come up on the next roulette spin. Risk managers encourage productive risk-taking in this regime, because there is little true cost. People tend to worry too much about these risks because they happen frequently, and not enough about what might happen on the worst days.


title: Value at risk

text: Outside the VaR limit, all bets are off. Risk should be analyzed with stress testing based on long-term and broad market data. Probability statements are no longer meaningful. Knowing the distribution of losses beyond the VaR point is both impossible and useless. The risk manager should concentrate instead on making sure good plans are in place to limit the loss if possible, and to survive the loss if not.


title: Value at risk

text: Another reason VaR is useful as a metric is due to its ability to compress the riskiness of a portfolio to a single number, making it comparable across different portfolios (of different assets). Within any portfolio it is also possible to isolate specific positions that might better hedge the portfolio to reduce, and minimise, the VaR.


title: Value at risk

text: VaR can be estimated either parametrically (for example, variance-covariance VaR or delta-gamma VaR) or nonparametrically (for examples, historical simulation VaR or resampled VaR). Nonparametric methods of VaR estimation are discussed in Markovich and Novak. A comparison of a number of strategies for VaR prediction is given in Kuester et al.


title: Value at risk

text: A McKinsey report published in May 2012 estimated that 85% of large banks were using historical simulation. The other 15% used Monte Carlo methods.


title: Value at risk

text: Backtesting is the process to determine the accuracy of VaR forecasts vs. actual portfolio profit and losses.


title: Value at risk

text: A key advantage to VaR over most other measures of risk such as expected shortfall is the availability of several backtesting procedures for validating a set of VaR forecasts. Early examples of backtests can be found in Christoffersen (1998), later generalized by Pajhede (2017), which models a "hit-sequence" of losses greater than the VaR and proceed to tests for these "hits" to be independent from one another and with a correct probability of occurring. E.g. a 5% probability of a loss greater than VaR should be observed over time when using a 95% VaR, these hits should occur independently.


title: Value at risk

text: A number of other backtests are available which model the time between hits in the hit-sequence, see Christoffersen and Pelletier (2004), Haas (2006), Tokpavi et al. (2014). and Pajhede (2017) As pointed out in several of the papers, the asymptotic distribution is often poor when considering high levels of coverage, e.g. a 99% VaR, therefore the parametric bootstrap method of Dufour (2006) is often used to obtain correct size properties for the tests. Backtest toolboxes are available in Matlab, or R—though only the first implements the parametric bootstrap method.


title: Value at risk

text: The problem of risk measurement is an old one in statistics, economics and finance. Financial risk management has been a concern of regulators and financial executives for a long time as well. Retrospective analysis has found some VaR-like concepts in this history. But VaR did not emerge as a distinct concept until the late 1980s. The triggering event was the stock market crash of 1987. This was the first major financial crisis in which a lot of academically-trained quants were in high enough positions to worry about firm-wide survival.


title: Value at risk

text: The crash was so unlikely given standard statistical models, that it called the entire basis of quant finance into question. A reconsideration of history led some quants to decide there were recurring crises, about one or two per decade, that overwhelmed the statistical assumptions embedded in models used for trading, investment management and derivative pricing. These affected many markets at once, including ones that were usually not correlated, and seldom had discernible economic cause or warning (although after-the-fact explanations were plentiful). Much later, they were named "Black Swans" by Nassim Taleb and the concept extended far beyond finance.


title: Value at risk

text: If these events were included in quantitative analysis they dominated results and led to strategies that did not work day to day. If these events were excluded, the profits made in between "Black Swans" could be much smaller than the losses suffered in the crisis. Institutions could fail as a result.


title: Value at risk

text: VaR was developed as a systematic way to segregate extreme events, which are studied qualitatively over long-term history and broad market events, from everyday price movements, which are studied quantitatively using short-term data in specific markets. It was hoped that "Black Swans" would be preceded by increases in estimated VaR or increased frequency of VaR breaks, in at least some markets. The extent to which this has proven to be true is controversial.


title: Value at risk

text: Abnormal markets and trading were excluded from the VaR estimate in order to make it observable. It is not always possible to define loss if, for example, markets are closed as after 9/11, or severely illiquid, as happened several times in 2008. Losses can also be hard to define if the risk-bearing institution fails or breaks up. A measure that depends on traders taking certain actions, and avoiding other actions, can lead to self reference.


title: Value at risk

text: This is risk management VaR. It was well established in quantitative trading groups at several financial institutions, notably Bankers Trust, before 1990, although neither the name nor the definition had been standardized. There was no effort to aggregate VaRs across trading desks.


title: Value at risk

text: The financial events of the early 1990s found many firms in trouble because the same underlying bet had been made at many places in the firm, in non-obvious ways. Since many trading desks already computed risk management VaR, and it was the only common risk measure that could be both defined for all businesses and aggregated without strong assumptions, it was the natural choice for reporting firmwide risk. J. P. Morgan CEO Dennis Weatherstone famously called for a "4:15 report" that combined all firm risk on one page, available within 15 minutes of the market close.


title: Value at risk

text: Risk measurement VaR was developed for this purpose. Development was most extensive at J. P. Morgan, which published the methodology and gave free access to estimates of the necessary underlying parameters in 1994. This was the first time VaR had been exposed beyond a relatively small group of quants. Two years later, the methodology was spun off into an independent for-profit business now part of RiskMetrics Group (now part of MSCI).


title: Value at risk

text: In 1997, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that public corporations must disclose quantitative information about their derivatives activity. Major banks and dealers chose to implement the rule by including VaR information in the notes to their financial statements.


title: Value at risk

text: Worldwide adoption of the Basel II Accord, beginning in 1999 and nearing completion today, gave further impetus to the use of VaR. VaR is the preferred measure of market risk, and concepts similar to VaR are used in other parts of the accord.


title: Value at risk

text: VaR has been controversial since it moved from trading desks into the public eye in 1994. A famous 1997 debate between Nassim Taleb and Philippe Jorion set out some of the major points of contention. Taleb claimed VaR:


title: Value at risk

text: In 2008 David Einhorn and Aaron Brown debated VaR in Global Association of Risk Professionals Review Einhorn compared VaR to "an airbag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident". He further charged that VaR:


title: Value at risk

text: New York Times reporter Joe Nocera wrote an extensive piece Risk Mismanagement on January 4, 2009, discussing the role VaR played in the Financial crisis of 2007–2008. After interviewing risk managers (including several of the ones cited above) the article suggests that VaR was very useful to risk experts, but nevertheless exacerbated the crisis by giving false security to bank executives and regulators. A powerful tool for professional risk managers, VaR is portrayed as both easy to misunderstand, and dangerous when misunderstood.


title: Value at risk

text: Taleb in 2009 testified in Congress asking for the banning of VaR for a number of reasons. One was that tail risks are non-measurable. Another was that for anchoring reasons VaR leads to higher risk taking.


title: Value at risk

text: VaR is not subadditive: VaR of a combined portfolio can be larger than the sum of the VaRs of its components.


title: Value at risk

text: For example, the average bank branch in the United States is robbed about once every ten years. A single-branch bank has about 0.0004% chance of being robbed on a specific day, so the risk of robbery would not figure into one-day 1% VaR. It would not even be within an order of magnitude of that, so it is in the range where the institution should not worry about it, it should insure against it and take advice from insurers on precautions. The whole point of insurance is to aggregate risks that are beyond individual VaR limits, and bring them into a large enough portfolio to get statistical predictability. It does not pay for a one-branch bank to have a security expert on staff.


title: Value at risk

text: As institutions get more branches, the risk of a robbery on a specific day rises to within an order of magnitude of VaR. At that point it makes sense for the institution to run internal stress tests and analyze the risk itself. It will spend less on insurance and more on in-house expertise. For a very large banking institution, robberies are a routine daily occurrence. Losses are part of the daily VaR calculation, and tracked statistically rather than case-by-case. A sizable in-house security department is in charge of prevention and control, the general risk manager just tracks the loss like any other cost of doing business.


title: Value at risk

text: As portfolios or institutions get larger, specific risks change from low-probability/low-predictability/high-impact to statistically predictable losses of low individual impact. That means they move from the range of far outside VaR, to be insured, to near outside VaR, to be analyzed case-by-case, to inside VaR, to be treated statistically.


title: Value at risk

text: VaR is a static measure of risk. By definition, VaR is a particular characteristic of the probability distribution of the underlying (namely, VaR is essentially a quantile). For a dynamic measure of risk, see Novak, ch. 10.


title: Value at risk

text: However, it can be bounded by coherent risk measures like Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) or entropic value at risk (EVaR).


title: Value at risk

text: A related class of risk measures is the 'Range Value at Risk' (RVaR), which is a robust version of CVaR.


title: Value at risk

text: For formula_16 (with formula_17 the set of all Borel measurable functions whose moment-generating function exists for all positive real values) we have


title: Value at risk

text: in which formula_20 is the moment-generating function of at . In the above equations the variable denotes the financial loss, rather than wealth as is typically the case.


title: Ningbo

text: Ningbo (; Ningbonese: "gnin² poq⁷" , ), formerly romanized as Ningpo, is a major sub-provincial city in northeast Zhejiang province, People's Republic of China. It comprises 6 urban districts, 2 satellite county-level cities, and 2 rural counties, including several islands in Hangzhou Bay and the East China Sea. Ningbo is the southern economic center of the Yangtze Delta megalopolis, and is also the core city and center of the Ningbo Metropolitan Area. To the north, Hangzhou Bay separates Ningbo from Shanghai; to the east lies Zhoushan in the East China Sea; on the west and south, Ningbo borders Shaoxing and Taizhou respectively. As of the 2020 Chinese National Census, the entire administrated area of Ningbo City had a population of 9.4 million (9,404,283), of which 4,479,635 lived in the built-up (or metro) area of its five urban districts. Within the next decade, the cities of Cixi, Yunhao and Fenghua will likely also be conurbated, expanding the Ningbo metro area to 8,140,660 inhabitants.


title: Ningbo

text: Ningbo is one of the 15 sub-provincial cities in China, and is one of the 5 in China (the other four being Dalian, Qingdao, Xiamen, and Shenzhen), with the municipality possessing a separate state-planning status in many economic departments, rather than being governed by Zhejiang Province. Therefore, Ningbo has provincial-level autonomy in making economic and financial policies.


title: Ningbo

text: In 2020, the GDP of Ningbo was CNY 1240.87 billion (US$191.68 billion), and it was ranked 12th among 300 cities in China. Moreover, Ningbo is among the wealthiest cities in China; it ranked 8th in terms of average yearly disposable income in the year of 2020. As of 2020, Ningbo has global headquarters and registered offices of over 100 listed companies, and many regional business headquarters. In 2021, Ningbo featured the 7th most listed companies of all cities in China. Furthermore, Ningbo was among the top 10 Chinese cities in the Urban Business Environment Report released by the Chinese state media China Central Television (CCTV) in 2019.


title: Ningbo

text: As a city with rich culture and a long history dating back to the in 6300 BC and the Hemudu culture in 4800 BC, Ningbo was awarded "City of Culture in East Asia" by the governments of China, Japan, and Korea in 2016. Ningbo is one of the top 200 cities in the world by scientific research as tracked by the Nature Index.


title: Ningbo

text: The port of Ningbo–Zhoushan, spread across several locations, is the world's busiest port by cargo tonnage and world's third-busiest container port since 2010.


title: Ningbo

text: The first character in the city's name "ning" ( or ) means "serene", while its second character "bo" () translates to "wave". The city is abbreviated "" () for the eponymous "Yong Hill" (), a prominent coastal hill near the city, and the Yong River that flows through Ningbo city.


title: Ningbo

text: Ningbo was once named Mingzhou (). The first character () is composed of two parts, representing two lakes inside the city wall: the Sun Lake () and the Moon Lake (), dating back to the Tang Dynasty in 636 AD. The old Sun Lake dried up in the 19th century, but was re-built in 2002 by the Ningbo government as one of the city parks.


title: Ningbo

text: Ningbo is one of China's oldest cities, with a history dating to the in 6300 BC and Hemudu culture in 4800 BC. Ningbo was known as a trade city on the silk road at least two thousand years ago, and later as a major port for foreign trade.


title: Ningbo

text: As of 2020, the earliest relics of human activity discovered in Ningbo City are from the in Yuyao. These relics date back to 6300 BC, evidencing early human consumption of seafood and rice. A large number of cultivated rice, farming tools, remains of dry fence buildings, remains of domestic livestock, and primitive religious items have been unearthed from related sites of the Hemudu culture (5000-4500 BC), evidencing human settlement and culture in the eastern part of the Ningshao Plain, where modern-day Ningbo city is located.


title: Ningbo

text: Before the Han Dynasty, the area where Ningbo City is located today was sparsely populated. In the Xia Dynasty, the location of Ningbo was called "Yin". In the Spring and Autumn Period, the area where Ningbo belonged was the Yue State. At that time, the Yue King Goujian built Juzhang City in the present-day Cicheng Town, which became the earliest city in Ningbo. In the latter half of the Warring States period, the area of Ningbo became the jurisdiction of Chu State. In 221 BC, Qin unified the six states and the Ningbo area was delegated to Kuaiji Commandery, with 3 counties of Yin, Yin, and Juzhang (some studies assert there were 4 counties of Yin, Yin, Juzhang, and Yuyao). In the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, Kuaiji Commandery belonged to the Kingdom of Jing and Wu. After the Seven Kingdoms was settled, Kuaiji Commandery was restored. In 589 AD (Sui Kai Huang nine years), the counties were merged under the Wu kingdom.


title: Ningbo

text: Since the Tang dynasty, Ningbo has been an important commercial port. Arab traders lived in Ningbo during the Song dynasty when it was known as Mingzhou or Siming, since the ocean-going trade passages took precedence over land trade during this time. It was a well known center of ocean-going commerce with the foreign world. These merchants did not intermingle with native Chinese, instead practicing their own customs and religion and inhabiting ghettos. They did not try to proselytize Islam to the Chinese. There was also a large Jewish community in Ningbo, as evidenced by the fact that, after a major flood destroyed Torah scrolls in Kaifeng in 1642, a replacement was sent to the Kaifeng Jews by the Jews at Ningbo.