After a brief welcome and introduction by Josef Meri and Juan Acevedo, the different presenters gave voice to the Vedas, the Buddhist scriptures, the Torah, Christian hymns and the Qur’an for a truly exceptional and inspiring afternoon.

This is an excerpt from the opening words:

“The pitfalls of expression are always lurking in interfaith exchanges, and those engaged feel as if treading on thin ice lest they are misinterpreted and then misquoted and misjudged… how could it be otherwise, if what is involved is trying to express what is beyond words and even beyond language?

“…music easily presents itself as a sufficient vehicle, or in any case as a subtler vehicle… reaching inwards, or upwards, or at least, through its rhythm, closer in language to our beating hearts, and even closer when use is made of the human voice as an instrument. True and timeless bridges between the corporeal and the subtle realms, we don’t seem to be able to determine exactly where is it that our intonations and invocations spring from, and how far they reach in their subtle repercussions.”

Please follow this link to our Library for full details and to listen to the audio recordings.

Representatives of five major religious traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, will be performing for each other and the general public some of the most important recitations and chants of their respective traditions. With a brief introduction giving the context and particular importance of each piece, we will listen to traditional recitations of the Vedas, Buddhist sutras, Jewish Torah recitation and chants, Christian chants and Islamic Qur’an recitation and Sufi chants.

For more information, please follow this link to our announcement, or click here to see the Woolf Institute announcement.

Keats & Shakespeare: the brief life of Keats and his works are considered in detail and on their deepest dimensions, having as a constant reference Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and drawing on Dr Lings’ own experience as a musician and poet.

Hamlet: this is the first of a series of lectures dedicated to the major plays of Shakespeare. Here Martin Lings draws not only on his studies of symbolism and his spiritual knowledge, but also on his stage experience. During the 1940s, for more than a decade, his work at the Cairo University gave him the opportunity to produce Shakespeare plays every year. This experience culminated years later in the publication of his The Secret of Shakespeare (click here for US distributor).

The first title, “Aspects of Sufism”, is an introduction to Sufism for a Western audience, giving glimpses of the crystalline facets of this inner side of Islam.

The second talk, “Human Origins and Destinies According to the Great Religions of the World”, is a penetrating overview of what could be called a spiritual anthropology, including also an eschatology, with a special view to the doctrinal points of contact among the different religions.

It is hoped that by introducing these aesthetic and structural improvements we are bringing the appearance of the website a little closer to its content, aspiring to conform to Plato’s dictum that “Beauty is the splendour of the True”.

Please take a look at the new design by clicking on this link. The library is now interconnected in a more organic way and this should make it easier to access related topics and authors. Our search tool continues to work as before with a few improvements to speed things up. We look forward to receiving your comments and any questions through our Contact page.

We would also like to welcome our latest Library addition, a remarkable article entitled “Socrates the Mystic”, giving a rare insight into the centuries-old discussion about the nature of Socrates’ daimon and trance-like experiences. Many thanks to Prof. John Bussanich, from the University of New Mexico, for his contribution.

Apologies to our subscribers for the recent re-duplication of a November news issue. Please ignore it as an unexpected outcome of our website overhaul.

Additionally, in our Audio Library you will find a new talk by Sebastian Brock on the Syrian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora, considering its modern history and contemporary challenges. With thanks to Heythrop College, University of London, for permission to record and publish this talk.

As our other publications, this book should now be available from major retail and wholesalers, but do contact us if you have any problem getting hold of it.

Additionally, we have a new book excerpt in our Judaism section. Thanks to the generosity of our friends at Fons Vitae, we have made available a chapter on “Prayer, Preaching and Reproof” by Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the famous Baal Shem Tov, affording unusual access to the deepest contemplative aspects of Jewish life in prayer.

In our Christianity section we gratefully acknowledge a new contribution on The Inner Dimension of Pilgrimage to Mount Athos by Dr Marco Toti.

Finally, in our Comparative Religion page, we have two new articles by Dr Rowan Williams, one on atheism and another one on Christian theology in its relations to other faiths. As usual, our gratitude goes to the
Archbishop’s Press office.

In our Audio section we have first, a double talk by Sebastian Brock and Ahmad Achtar on the Prayer of the Heart, as viewed from the Syriac Christian and Islamic perspectives, and second, a recent lecture by Reza Shah-Kazemi on Tawhid and Love in Islam, as part of a recent conference at Heythrop College.

Our Islam section can now count with an article by Imam Zaid Shakir (Zaytuna College), “Jihad is not Perpetual Warfare”, and also with a new article By Shaykh Hamza Yusuf: “Generous Tolerance in Islam and its Effects on the Life of a Muslim”. These two articles, firmly grounded as they are in the traditional exegetic methods of Islamic sciences, could safely be considered required reading for any serious treatment of the concepts of jihad and Islamic tolerance in English scholarly literature. Our thanks to the authors, Sandala.org and Zaytuna College for making this possible.