This Book Comprises A Brief Life Stetch Of An Outstanding Mystic Of The Twentieth Century, Bawa Muhaiyadden Of Sri Lanka Who Breathed His Last On 8 December 1986, A Gist Of His Teachings And Certain Selected Dialogues.

Armed with a generous heart, subtle mind, and a PhD in comparative religion from Columbia, Lex Hixon, as host for WBAI's In the Spirit, was able to interview and skillfully probe the leading spiritual lights of the seventies and beyond. Twenty-five of those interviews, finely edited, appear here for the first time in print. Includes short bios and photos. Interviewees include Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Daniel Berrigan, Swami Muktananda, Kalu Rinpoche, and Stephen Gaskin. Lex Hixon was an accomplished spiritual practitioner, scholar, and author who explored the great religious traditions extensively. He published nine books and spent seventeen years hosting the radio program In the Spirit.

This book sheds light on the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship (BMF), one of North America's major Sufi movements, and one of the first to establish a Sufi shrine in the region. It provides the first comprehensive overview of the BMF, offering new insight into its historical development and practices, and charting its establishment in both the United States and Sri Lanka. Through ethnographic research, Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism shows that the followers of Bawa in the United States and Sri Lanka share far more similarities in the relationships they formed with spaces, Bawa, and Sufism, than differences. This challenges the accepted conceptualization of Sufism in North America as having a distinct “Americanness”, and prompts scholars to re-consider how Sufism is developing in the modern American landscape, as well as globally. The book focuses on the transnational spaces and ritual activities of Bawa's communities, mapping parallel shrines and pilgrimages. It examines the roles of culture, religion, and gender and their impact on ritual embodiment, drawing attention to the global range of a Sufi community through engagement with its distinct Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Christian followers.

This Book Comprises A Brief Life Stetch Of An Outstanding Mystic Of The Twentieth Century, Bawa Muhaiyadden Of Sri Lanka Who Breathed His Last On 8 December 1986, A Gist Of His Teachings And Certain Selected Dialogues.

The challenges and changes that take place when religions move from one cultural context to another present unique opportunities for interreligious dialogue. In new cultural environments religions are not only propelled to enter into dialogue with the traditional or dominant religion of a particular culture; religions are also invited to enter into dialogue with one another about cultural changes. In this volume, scholars from different religious traditions discuss the various types of dialogue that have emerged from the process of acculturation. While the phenomenon of religious acculturation has generally focused on Western religions in non-Western contexts, this volume deals predominantly with the acculturation in the United States. It thus offers a fresh look at the phenomenon of acculturation while also lifting up an often implicit or ignored dimension of interreligious dialogue.

A bibliography of books and index of articles in periodicals on Islam and the Muslim world. Also includes reviews.