Traversing the Heart: Journeys of the Inter-Religious Imagination (Studies in Religion and the Arts)

Contents 6 Acknowledgments 10 List of Color Plates 12 List of Black/White Illustrations 14 Introduction: A Pilgrimage to the Heart (Richard Kearney) 18 Traversals (I): Hindu-Christian) 50 1. The Bangalore Conference 50 Open-Source Hinduism (Siddhartha) 52 Yoga and the Wounded Heart (Jyoti Sahi) 60 On Spirituality and Organized Religion: Conversations With (Raghu Ananthanarayanan) 98 Empathy and Inter-Religious Imagination (Catherine Cornille) 124 Inclusive Imagination: A Comment on Religion and Culture in India (Chandan Gowda) 140 My Adventure with Inter-Religious Dialogue (Joseph A. Samarakone, O.M.I) 144 A Monk's Journey in Search of God (Simon Sleeman, O.S.B) 158 Embodied Consciousness in Tantric Yoga and the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (James Morley) 164 Confessions of a Hindu-Catholic Artist (Caroline Mackenzie) 184 2. In The Wake Of Bangalore 208 The Heart Beyond Hearts (Swami Tyagananda) 210 Childhood, Intuition, Vocation: Remembering Sara Grant (Fanny Howe) 214 Arunachala (Shirley du Boulay) 220 The Lord of the Heart: Abhinavagupta's Aesthetics and Kashmir Śaivism (Bettina Bäumer) 236 Encountering the Divine Mother in Hindu and Christian Hymns (Francis X. Clooney, S.J) 252 Narratives of a Dialogue Pilgrim (Albert Nambiaparambil, C.M.I) 266 Pranayama: Breathing from the Heart (Richard Kearney) 290 Spiritual Improvisations: Ramakrishna, Aurobindo, and the Freedom of Tradition (Martin Cohen) 300 Color Plates 318 Traversals (II):Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish 1. Islamic Legacies 334 1. Islamic Legacies 334 Imaging Islam: Intellect and Imagination in Islamic Philosophy, Poetry, and Painting (James W. Morris) 336 India: A Laboratory of Inter-Religious Experiment (Maqbool Ahmed Siraj) 362 The Paradox of Proximity to the Infinite: An Exploration of Sidrat Al-Muntaha, "The Lote Tree Beyond which None May Pass" (Hannah Bigelow Merriman) 372 Following (Steffen A. J. Stelzer) 386 2. Buddhist Offerings 398 Knowing The Heart Sūtra by Heart (Joseph S. O'Leary) 400 Pure Perception and Equanimity of Heart (John Makransky) 414 On Seeing the Birth of the Heart (Mary M. Anderson) 428 3. Jewish and Christian Transformations 456 Healing Wounds: Reflections on Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interfaith Partnership in Poland (Edward K. Kaplan) 458 Desire and the Desirable: Nicholas De Cusa's Interfaith Imagination (Fred Dallmayr) 466 Promises of Advent: North and South (Eileen Rizo-Patron) 480 Notes on Contributors 504 Index of Terms/Topics 514 Index of Names/Titles 531 The key wager of Traversing the Heart - Journeys of the Inter-religious Imagination is that a spiritual imaginary operating at the level of metaphor, narrative, symbol and epiphany can traverse the borders of dogma and ideology and open genuine conversations between wisdom traditions. Like every hermeneutics of the heart, this journey begins to unfold in a concrete space and time: the inter-religious conference at Bangalore in June 2007. While this collection does not claim to cover the religious traditions of all continents, its concluding essay on transculturation in religious art highlights the importance of the North-South dialogue as a necessary supplement to the East-West one largely addressed in the book. As a call to future journeys and dialogue, this volume aims to communicate the one seminal lesson learned during the India conference: that in our third millennium, religions will be interreligious or they will not be at peace. --Book Jacket The key wager of Traversing the Heart - Journeys of the Inter-religious Imagination is that a spiritual imaginary operating at the level of metaphor, narrative, symbol and epiphany can traverse the borders of dogma and ideology and open genuine conversations between wisdom traditions. Like every hermeneutics of the heart, this journey begins to unfold in a concrete space and time: the interreligious conference at Bangalore in June 2007. While this collection does not claim to cover the religious traditions of all continents, its concluding essay on transculturation in Andean-Christian art highlights the importance of the North-South dialogue as a necessary supplement to the East-West one largely addressed in the book. As a call to future journeys and dialogue, this volume aims to communicate the one seminal lesson learned during the India conference: that in our third millennium, religions will be inter-religious or they will not be at peace.