In search of wisdom and its blind spots: Catholic reflections on Swami Vivekananda’s 150^th birth anniversary

So stark, so pristine that last statement: these little manifestations do not befit thee, disclosing what should be recognized upon examination, namely, that much conditioned thinking and acting diminishes persons’ presence in the world because it dissociates them from the true self which is non-different from the ground of all being, or Brahman.

Christians reading these words from his fourth lecture on Practical Vedanta may feel at home. The old self: gone. Upon conversion from the tattered and defeated old self to the real, pure, and all-knowing self: fearlessness. From recognition of the self as one’s true ground erupts a confidence in a whole new horizon of truth and meaning that have just opened up to perception. Clearly Vivekananda is calling for a kind of conversion experience, akin to what Christians would call metanoia, a turning away from brittle narrowness and constriction and a turning toward magnanimity and charity that is all-inclusive and synced with the depth of reality (Barron 1998). Or we might enlist the language of “vocation,” which in my tradition functions as a call or imperative more fully to become the person (the imperative) one already is on account of divine action (the indicative). The revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ discloses persons to be God’s good creatures who are fallen or broken creatures, but whose brokenness is not the last word or the most definitive word about them. For, as creatures of God, persons are defined through the creative and redemptive action of God which makes and remakes them in ways that are more profound and constitutional than the brokenness they inherit and in turn replicate in their own lives with others. Christians familiar with this trope can therefore hear resonance in Vivekananda’s call to transition away from the old self which is experienced as weakness even in its illusory reality toward the new – or real – self, described as an “infinite” and “all-knowing” nature, which constitutes already the depth of one’s identity even as the knowledge of this identity remains to be “aroused” in oneself and in others.

To oscillate back and forth between this selection from Paul and that selection from Vivekananda helps one learn into a perennial human experience or condition – call it ignorance or misapprehension (avidya), sinfulness, or by another category that instructs us not especially of guilt but the clear ways in which our lives proceed against their natural grain, against their most true identity, distorted not in some fixed or static manner yet in one that while pervasive is susceptible to change, conversion, growth in identity. To use the language of the great Reformed theologian Karl Barth, we live in self-contradiction, but in Christ are shown what ‘real humanity’ looks like, how it is responsive to God and responsible to others. Realization, in other words, is crucial to the spiritual projects of both Paul and Vivekananda (Sharma 2003, 91).

The convergence of voices notwithstanding, clear differences between Paul and Vivekananda emerge in the second half of each man’s statement, namely, that for Vivekananda the path out of the muck and misunderstanding is through self-realization of one’s own inherent divinity; in short the position of Vedanta, that the self or atman is one with the universal self or Brahman, such that the deeper “reality in every man [sic] should be the object of worship” (Vivekananda 1976d, 358). Whereas for Paul, human subjects are acted upon by God in Christ, and only then are able to become active in the faith that trusts in God and works in love for all. Faith here signals ‘trust’; trust that in Jesus Christ God has confirmed and raised the human person to dignity, to reconciliation with God and with fellow persons, and that as a consequence of such divine action and human response, one is now free to live rightly in covenant relationship. The soteriologies – if we can use the term “vaguely” – of the two men signal clear distinctions in their understandings of the human person as well as consonance in their shared sense of the difference right understanding makes, the difference made in an identity-confirming positive response to vocation (Neville and Wildman 2001, 198; Sheveland 2011, 1–3). This difference is spelled out powerfully in a life of authenticity with and in the company of others, in what Paul refers to as ‘new life’ and ‘good works’ and Vivekananda as ‘seeing every man as God’ (Vivekananda 1976b, 326).

Many know that Swami Vivekananda was uncomfortable with the language of ‘sin’. No doubt some of the Christian missionaries in India about whom he was rightly concerned are to blame in part. Analogously, many Christians today are themselves uncomfortable with sin-talk. For many it connotes an unavoidable condition of guilt implicating the physical and indeed sexual self. Even worse, for some, sin-talk connotes a twisted creator who in the words of Christopher Hitchens “creates people sick and commands them to be well”^c.

A highly suggestive remark on the category of sin at the close of the nineteenth century, these words seem to bear a thick colonial and evangelical missionary experience inflecting them with additional meaning beyond the theological. While one can debate the degree to which Vivekananda’s construal of the doctrine was conditioned by missionaries through whom he and many Indians came into contact with the teaching, neither his speeches nor Lectures on Practical Vedanta offer any clear evidence that he was aware of the connective tissue between sin and grace. In the emphasis he gives to sin as constitutive of persons, of sin as a belief which erects prohibitions and incorrectly binds one down finally against one’s true nature as a creature of God, Swami Vivekananda does not appear aware of the narrative of grace by which sin-talk can be meaningfully Christian. In this disagreement, Swami Vivekananda and the Catholic tradition actually find themselves in substantive agreement despite appearances. For both can agree that the human person is most adequately appreciated and addressed in terms of her nondual “native purity” (Vivekananda) or redetermination by God in Christ (Paul) rather than the distortions and suffering to which she frequently succumbs.

Certainly Vivekananda’s nondualism looms large in this statement. But also looming large in Vivekananda’s lived-experience are some poor ambassadors of the gospel who tried to evangelize the sub-continent in a climate of not just colonial oppression but also – and Vivekananda picked up on this – a climate wherein Indians themselves had internalized a colonial, Western, Christian critique of them as weak and emasculated, as idolaters, and as sinners acutely in need of redemption from some external source. According to the Christian message as he understood it, as he received it, sin simply designates what human beings most basically are in a static, fixed manner. As we now know very well, one of the most pernicious traits of colonial oppression is that the oppressed internalize, adopt, or begin to see themselves through the eyes of their oppressors. The sort of optic lens that appears to have been thrust upon Vivekananda is one through which Christians themselves see poorly and should, with Vivekananda, eschew (Sharma 2003, 84). If Christians give the impression that sinfulness simply spells human negativity and weakness in absolute or fixed terms, they’ve not told their story well (Vivekananda 1976a, 300). His polemic makes sense as a pastoral intention to empower colonized Indians who may have internalized oppressive religious judgments, more sense than an abstract or doctrinal disagreement with Christianity.

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex and systematic theological issue, in the context of this Catholic interreligious engagement with Vivekananda, four ground rules for sin talk can be outlined which stress the pastoral function of the teaching and may, therefore, help to recover the salutary nature of the doctrine. First, it disabuses one from the habit of mis-taking subjective experience as somehow exhaustive of objective reality or fact; in other words we chronically suffer from hubris. Despite his discomfort with the term, Vivekananda happens to reference this dynamic of sin throughout his writings in the terms of the rope and snake analogy he learned from the Upanishads; partiality and misapprehension have one confusing a rope for a snake, with the all the consequent fear and anxiety. The perception of self and other needs attention, for our current modus operandi offends not only the Creator but perhaps most significantly the creature’s own given nature or being as a creature of God. Second, and as a consequence of such hubris or failed perception, we tend to fall out of right relationship with others in direct proportion with ego-conditioning, for the ego conditions the terms of our relating with others in the world. Sin is not well understood merely as a vertical offense against God, nor reductively as transgressive acts; the nature of it as offense is made incarnate and visible through the distorted horizontal relationships with others that ensue as its consequence. Perhaps more pivotal than failures of personal piety or rectitude, the category of sin underscores dissociative and dysfunctional interpersonal dynamics scarring concrete human lives in encounter in a way that both precedes and perpetuates all encounters as their conditioning factor.

Third, the reality and depth of sinfulness or self-contradiction is disclosed precisely in the experience of being healed in Christ, in the experience of being personally and gratuitously the subject of divine grace experienced as mercy, healing, and reconciliation. This means the word ‘sin’ functions like an ungrammatical utterance when ripped from the grammar of grace which provides rules for its coherence as a Christian category. Without the experience of forgiveness and reconciliation in Christ, one lacks even the insight to name what sin is, much less diminish its effects of personal and interpersonal brokenness. Fourth, sin-talk actually helps to clarify victimization and redress its destructiveness more accurately and sensitively. The sort of victimization entailed in, for example, sexual abuse of children has been explored as one such example (O’Laughlin 2013). Recent research argues persuasively that sin-talk meaningfully captures the dynamics of pathology that begin in the abused themselves; never mind the abuser for the moment. Consider the experience of young children abused in developmentally sensitive periods of their childhood: the violation of body and self by persons perceived as trustworthy and in positions of authority gives rise subsequently to victims’ total relational disorientation that ruins their cognitive and emotional capacities to enter into rightly ordered relationships in the future. If this weren’t enough personal loss, consider the statistics demonstrating that the majority of abusers were, themselves, previously victims of abuse. Distorted and distorting, this pattern of human relating represents the pathology of sin (McFadyen 2000, 57–79, 228–229).

Because there is such connective tissue between ‘sin’ and ‘grace’ in the Christian imaginary, we might notice one theme in Vivekananda’s writings that seems to function as the corollary. For him as well, the purpose of sin-talk in Vedanta is to cast greater light upon the oneness of all life. Scattered throughout his Lectures on Practical Vedanta, the oneness of all life surfaces as a repetitive trope. But let me back into Vivekananda’s treatment by addressing it first in my own tradition.

The principle of solidarity is an important category in modern Catholic Social Teaching; most often we hear ethicists make use of the category, and while there is a small canon of papal and Vatican texts that call for greater attention to solidarity in our globalized world, in my view solidarity as a theological category suffers from underdevelopment, not terribly well differentiated from neighbor love even as it signals dispositions and a level of conversion upon which acts of neighbor love would be reliant. Use of the principle must confront some conceptual vagueness. Use of the principle might also confront the failure of Christians to apply the discipline of solidarity consistently in their daily lives, political commitments, international politics, ecological care, border crossings or any other arena in which the principle of solidarity, when rightly understood, succeeds in illuminating moral blind spots. We do not have a theologically developed and nuanced statement that defines theologically what solidarity is, nor have we statements that explore how we might develop and deepen our appreciation for it through interreligious consultations through which Christians can gain exposure to the wisdom of other religious paths by taking seriously the permission given in Nostra Aetate 2 to embrace and internalize the elements of truth and goodness in other religions. There is a world of difference between tacitly acknowledging the possibility of truth and goodness in other religions versus internalizing one’s exposure to concrete experiences of truth and goodness in other religions so as to recast and deepen the attitudes and actions of solidarity. Solidarity is at once a tremendous yet underdeveloped resource for Christians, complicated by the fact that it targets blind spots, our preferences and biases to which we become attached, including biases of religious preference.

Because the principle of solidarity addresses persons and communities in their blind spots or unconscious and distorting ideological views, with injunctions that might be understood tacitly and abstractly but not quite grasped or acted upon in the radical ways demanded by the Gospel, solidarity functions like a prophetic category redirecting persons to right relationship, and in so doing it exposes the chronic failure to cope with the radical care enjoined in the Gospel. In this way, solidarity is like conversion, in that both need care, nurture, and growth, and one should expect setbacks while inclining oneself to critical voices and perspectives. Solidarity does not denote moral rectitude or purity, but grounds the brokenness of the human condition in a framework of unity, healing, and acceptance.

Poetic and edifying, this passage reveals so much of his thought: the inadequacy of categories like theism and atheism to depict Vedanta; the search for self not as a selfish enterprise but one that explodes into a felt sense of unity with all creatures beyond conventional boundaries viewed as real by social consensus; and a gentle pastoral encouragement to go beneath the surface of our degradation or self-contradiction to discover, trust, and live into a whole new world of authenticity and recognition, where all are one.

Perhaps words like these are best interpreted in silence. But if we are to speak, then those words relate well to an incredibly brief yet revealing statement made by a noted Indologist, Christopher Key Chapple, in his book Yoga and the Luminous. At one point in the book Chapple records his early reflections on yoga discipline as a young man, particularly his growth in understanding the virtue of satya, which in yoga practice is the cultivation of truthfulness or honesty in a plain sense as well as in the more nuanced, reflective and felt sense of moral accountability toward others discovered through right encounter with them. He welcomes the reader into his own discovery when he realizes quite plainly yet powerfully that ‘truth necessitates care’ (Chapple 2008, 42). As though in the form of a rahasya (secret mystery), these three words approach what Vivekananda expresses in his rejection of dualism in favor of unity, of multiplicity in favor of simplicity, of hatred in favor of love, of disintegration in favor of integration, of a heart that is brittle and unreconciled over one that is magnanimous and capable of seeing one in all and all in one. To see truthfully and act in truth is to be redirected – through practice – to encounter and care for others out of a felt sense of connectedness between oneself and others (Chapple 2008, 33–38).

Where Vivekananda can help to deepen – even radicalize – the meaning of solidarity for Christians is in the dawning realization of interpersonal union. In such union the conventional borders we habitually support and defend are shown to be something like the ‘little narrow paths’ and ‘small ruts’ to which he referred. He rests the performance of solidarity on the shoulders of a deep spiritual interiority. To be sure, the theological terms from which Vedanta and Christian sources derive the truth of unity are distinct. But the outcome and perhaps the method appear to be highly analogous, namely, that solidarity is first a spiritual realization before it can become spontaneous redemptive action that reconciles living beings to each other. In other words, ‘truth necessitates care’. Certainly by now one can appreciate why Vivekananda is still held in such high esteem by people today, whether Hindu or not, for it is simply edifying to peer into the reconciled and pristine mind of a person whose interior experience and realization not only resonate deep truth, but can be interfaced as a dialogue partner with Christian experience and hope.

All this notwithstanding, what is the reader to make of the less savory aspects of the Swami’s thought? Four tendencies can be noted. As do all, he seems to reflect his times, for better or worse.

For example, consider the way he renders Hinduism into a stunningly homogenized, almost singular entity, called ‘Vedanta’, and what doing so may mean up against the fact that some of the most notable British Orientalist scholars likewise elevated Vedanta above other expressions of Hinduism, as the elite core of the religion’s contribution to humanity (Sugirtharajah 2008). Likewise, what to do with his absorption of Buddhism into a Vedanta that itself had been reinterpreted in a sparse and homogenizing manner as a slightly heterodox feature of Hinduism, not an independent tradition related to but also rejecting key premises of Hindu traditions, to be considered on its own terms rather than domesticated? What to do with his variation of a pluralist theory of religions, widely critiqued in the literature as a bit simplistic and inattentive to the religious details and differences that might challenge his version of a pluralist hypothesis (Sharma 2003, 94)? Or more distressingly, what to do about his unacceptable impression of Islam, the prophet, and the Quran, which have led some commentators to suggest that Vivekananda operated with a ‘soft’ version of Hindutva, a nationalist ideology that after his death became rather virulent in its exclusion of Muslims as equal citizens and, despite its critique of the mleccha (foreign) West and colonial experience, actually emulated aspects of Nazi ideology (Vivekananda 1976c, 335; Vivekananda 1976d, 353; Hansen 1999, 70; Sharma 2003, 71; Nussbaum 2008, 152–185)?

Rather than these tendencies diminishing his influence, I suggest they confirm it. The very shortcomings in the human condition against which he warned his audiences and readers – such as the tendency to assess others according to one’s own criteria rather than theirs – are so pervasive as not to escape manifestation even in his own life, despite the many countervailing concepts and practices evident in his speeches and writings (Sharma 2003, 86; Vivekananda 1976e, 24). Such disconnects may actually render his critique of dualisms and his prescription for solidarity that much more powerful, urgent for today, and fitting for interreligious collaboration. Catholics who register these shortcomings in Vivekananda’s outlook as worthy of attention can do so primarily because analogous discomforts are on display in their own tradition and perhaps – more to the point – in their tendencies as human beings. His shortcomings are like a mirror into which a Catholic might choose to gaze more accurately at her own tendencies and the inconvenient artifacts of her time, place, tradition, and inheritance.

One can note in passing an analogous list of four tendencies, as shortcomings, in the Catholic tradition experienced today. First, it clings to an “inclusive” or “fulfillment” theology of religions that many have argued homogenizes and flattens out religious differences by absorbing or relocating them within distinctly Christian and Catholic frameworks of Christ and Church. All of this despite and because of the clearly inclusive ethos of the Second Vatican Council and its monumental if brief Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate), and a series of papal and Vatican documents on the subject since 1965, whose framework for inclusion is vulnerable to the charge of domestication (Clifford 2005). In its historical context, the development of an inclusive theological assessment of religions articulated first in 1965 and refined since represents a truly remarkable development in the history of Christian thought. Still, one may yet probe the degree of inclusion or the theological a priori givens around which such inclusion is made – for example, Christ as the unique, absolute savior, and as the unique “way” that fulfills all the other “ways” in which human persons strive to counter the restless of their hearts – and speculate as to whether the appropriate Catholic goal of theological inclusion can be achieved through alternative and more inclusive theological means^d. Similarly, Vivekananda had a complex understanding of the relationship of his own Advaita to other religious ways, at times sounding pluralist in orientation and at other times thoroughly inclusivist, as was the case in his view that the truth realized among Hindus through Advaita rendered them more tolerant than other religious traditions could claim, and the only religion in which, he claimed, persecution of other religions had been absent (Sharma 2003, 84, 88).

Second, the tradition clings to what it thinks of as an ecumenical view of other Christian churches even as it refuses to acknowledge them as churches in the proper sense, unhelpfully labeling them as ‘ecclesial communities’, with apparent disinterest toward the pastoral implications such a judgment raises or the concrete pastoral warrants for which the judgment could be made. That is, what, pastorally, could warrant such a judgment, what is gained by it, and does catholicity require it?^e These questions drive to the heart of what Christians understand themselves to be, as church. Similarly, Vivekananda revised and reasserted the merits of Hinduism for the world he encountered through travel and, much like the Orientalist celebration of Hinduism, the revision downplayed and even degraded the rich, heterogeneous expressions of South Asian Hindu traditions, such that Hinduism became an elite, cerebral universal faith readily exported to the world, largely shorn from its local variations and customs on the subcontinent. In this way, Vivekananda’s Neo-Vedantic revisions echo the Orientalist assessment of what in Hinduism was deemed most valuable and exportable, lending probability to the view expressed by one author that Vivekananda was a “prisoner of history” (Sharma 2003, 84). Today, of course, scholarship of Indian traditions does not accept such a framework of understanding. Indeed, his stress on Advaita can be appreciated without accepting the implicit demotion of local and cultural variations within Hindu communities. So too, Catholics themselves increasingly question the meaningfulness of viewing their own community as “church” in the proper sense while reserving for other community’s the inconvenient designation of “ecclesial communities.” A recent development known as “receptive ecumenism” has gained momentum in Catholic circles in the North Atlantic by asking not what Catholicism can teach other churches, but where and how other churches can therapeutically address weaknesses and woundedness in Catholic tradition and forms of governance (Murray 2008; Murray 2011; Lakeland 2011). Catholic views of the other as opportunity rather than threat are both more adequately Christian and more adequately honest to the experience of many Catholics today who find their communion to be a broken communion in ways that may not be sufficiently remediable through recourse to the tradition’s own internal sources, but may stand in genuine therapeutic need of the insights of others.

Third, the tradition has made progress toward but has not yet fully expressed a theology of Judaism and the Jewish people that resists domestication, homogenization, and for some, supersessionism (Cunningham 2012, 33). While Nostra Aetate in 1965 unequivocally affirmed fraternity and unrestricted neighbor love toward all while rejecting all forms of prejudice, discrimination, and violence, a theology of Jesus Christ that succeeds at being particular and unique on the one hand, and non-homogenizing or domesticating of Judaism and Jewish people on the other, remains elusive. For example, Roman Catholic liturgy continues to utilize biblical texts that contain anti-Jewish and supersessionist interpretive opportunities. It is not at all clear that these elements within the biblical witness are seen clearly for what they are: evidence of the painful political and interpersonal divorce occurring in the synagogue between Jews who confessed Christ as Lord and Jews who did not. Nor is it clear that Catholics, today, appreciate Judaism as a developed and developing tradition beyond the comparatively narrow confines of early rabbinic Judaism disclosed in the New Testament witness. Since 1969 these and other scenes of growth in identity and understanding have been explored by a group of scholars engaged in Catholic-Jewish dialogue, called the Christian Scholars Group. In 2002 the group published a ten-point statement entitled “A Sacred Obligation: rethinking Christian faith in relation to Judaism and the Jewish people” and, in 2005 the group published an edited collection of essays entitled Seeing Judaism Anew which includes chapter length expansions of each of the ten points. While none declare that sincere Catholic dialogue with Jews and Judaism has reached maturity, the dialogue to date has been marked clearly by careful attention both to orthodox Christian commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord while also making space – theologically – for an appreciation of the enduring covenant with Israel and a willingness, self-critically, to reinterpret anti-Jewish possibilities in biblical texts with hermeneutical and ethical sophistication. All this in a spirit of hospitality wherein Christians hear the calls of their Jewish brothers and sisters to be seen as they are and not according to the predetermined roles or “scripts” they – and their tradition – had been assigned by outsiders in the past (Connelly 2012).

Fourth, religious leadership as well as the faithful not infrequently have uttered public and unfavorable characterizations of Islam, the Quran, and of Muslim people and the prophet Muhammad, and for some in today’s truly regrettable climate of sectarian division and violence within Islamic communities and prejudicial assessments made by many outside of those communities, these utterances are simply accepted as true and universal, despite abundant learning opportunities through scholarship and from interreligious dialogues involving leaders, professionals, and the faithful, which falsify such misconceptions or deeply complicate them and therefore render them inadequate as generalizations. Like Vivekananda in his own time, many today are “prisoners of history” when it comes to seeing Islamic people and traditions favorably or, at a minimum, in terms of their own historical development, multi-cultural ethos, internal ideological diversity, and the ongoing toxicity of a colonial past functioning as a key ingredient in the political instability and religious radicalization plaguing many Muslim societies today. Like Vivekananda in his own unfortunate historical moment of colonial disfigurement, many today are unable to rise above the stereotyped features of an Islam that is intolerant, fractious, and bloody, one easily contrasted with a Christianity presumed to lack these vices, not unlike the manner in which Vivekananda tended to tar Islam and then contrast it with his understanding of a more universal and superior Hinduism. The well-known document entitled A Common Word Between us and You, released in 2009 by Jordan’s Royal Al Aal-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and endorsed by a large global cohort of Islamic scholars from a broad consensus of traditions, has been instructive for Christians^f. They have learned that initiatives of solidarity do come from outside their own tradition, even in politically unfavorable circumstances like our own and from communities unhelpfully stereotyped as intolerant, and even when their own leadership has not, in this case, acted first with sensitivity and prophetic courage. Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address might have been maligned and used as reason to disengage further from Christians, but it was not. Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad and the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute converted the Regensburg moment into an opportunity to recover and deepen the theological and ethical bonds between these two global communities. Since the initiative began five years ago, an historic and perhaps unprecedented dialogue has developed between Muslims and Christians worldwide. If Vivekananda operated with a ‘soft’ version of Hindutva, one in which Hindu identity was predicated in part on selective antipathy toward Islam, Christians today have the chance to reassess their own views of Christian identity and perhaps nationalism as well to probe the marginalized persons and traditions on which such identities seem to depend. Here too, such probing is likely to disclose as much about Christians as about Muslims.

Fifth, and in relation to the fourth, who could deny that many Christians across an array of denominations in the United States and on both sides of the political aisle have more or less allowed Christian identity to be assimilated into specific understandings of American nationalism and exceptionalism, so that reductive views of nation and political persuasion become uncritically related to or confused with what counts as Christian in the public and private spheres (Nussbaum 2008)? Who can deny that in many quarters, ideological cooptation of discipleship and Christian living harm those deemed outsiders and, therewith, the public face of Christianity and the church? The problematic linking of Hindu identity to nationalist concerns in post-colonial India is best viewed not as a problem to which others have succumbed but as a ubiquitous shortcoming entailed in being human to which persons across an array of traditions, times, and places, can and do succumb.

However inconvenient Vivekananda’s shortcomings were, noted above, they are not ones from which Christians have been immune. Indeed, the study of Vivekananda and his historical context on these matters can be instructive for all who wish to confront honestly such vulnerabilities while retrieving – critically yet sympathetically – wisdom and learning available in both traditions. The analogies briefly noted here are exploratory and suggestive, not conclusive; they invite deeper thought into both historical moments and the role of religious narrative and authority evident therein, and they invite a willingness to reconsider the ways in which the solidarity of human frailty functions as a great equalizer in religious and other affairs.

^aThe Los Angeles archdiocesan Hindu-Catholic Dialogue Group held this event immediately prior to the conference Vedanta: Its Many Manifestations Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, 15–16 June 2013, Loyola Marymount University. http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/yoga/doshi/doshivedanta/

^bThe website for the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions can be found here: http://www.parliamentofreligions.org/index.cfm. The summary report of the Melbourne Parliament can be found here: http://www.parliamentofreligions.org/_includes/files/reports/PWR2009-Report.pdf. Last accessed 11/21/2013.

^cThe Munk Debates, 2010, http://www.munkdebates.com/debates/religion. Last accessed 07/23/2014.

^dSecond Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate, no. 2. Available here: http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html

^eE.g., Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus: on the unicity and salvific universality of Christ and the Church, no. 17. Available here: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html

^f A Common word between us and you: five year anniversary book. Available here: http://www.acommonword.com/

^gLuke Timothy Johnson, “Dry Bones: Why Religion Can’t Live without Mysticism,” Commonweal: a Review of Religion, Politics, and Culture Commonweal 137/4 (February 26, 2010): 11–18. Available here: http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/dry-bones