Perry Schmidt-Leukel, a German scholar of comparative religion at the University of Munster, is coming out with an intriguing scholarly book on interreligious dialogue and spiritual growth entitled, Transformation by Integration: How Inter-faith Encounter Changes Christianity (London, 2009).Schmidt-Leukel is a prolific academician who puts out a well-researched book nearly every other year, and his area of interest is interfaith (particularly Buddhist-Christian) relations, which, in case anyone doesn't know, just happens to be my scholarly focus as well. This volume is particularly interesting for those wanting to know more about how interfaith dialogue and exchange might impact people and their religions in terms of spiritual transformation. Since there's relatively little scholarly or popular literature on this topic, this is a cutting-edge subject matter. It should be informative and instructive from both an academic and personal-spiritual perspective.
As a side-note, the Unity Institute's Lyceum 2010 theological conference is scheduled to be about East-West religious conversation. Since I'm always a participant in the Lyceum conference and my Ph.D. dissertation topic is concerned with Buddhist-Christian dialogue and its impact on personal-spiritual transformation, I plan to present a paper very similar to Schmidt-Leukel's important subject matter. Becoming more aware of how interfaith relations contribute to growing in understanding "the other" and ourselves better spiritually is extremely important in our current context of religious pluralism and globalization. And the Unity movement can and has been providing a supportive environment for this kind of activity to flourish.
Here's a little review that Amazon has tantalized us with awaiting the book's publication this upcoming May 31:
A growing number of people experience their own spiritual lives as being inspired by more than one religious tradition. Multi-religious identity formation and double-belonging are obvious signs of a process of significant transformation as a result inter-faith encounter - a transformation that had been expected and positively willed by various inter-faith theologians. "Transformation by Integration" looks more deeply at a number of issues involved, including: What does it mean theologically to move beyond tolerance towards a genuine appreciation of other religions? How can multi-religious identity be assessed theologically? And, will we have to reconsider the widespread dismissal of syncretism? Perry Schmidt-Leukel takes the next theological step on the basis of a pluralist paradigm within the theology of religions. (Amazon.com)
(Above photo from Amazon.com.)
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