Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T00:21:37.225Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

East in the West: Resolving a Spiritual Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Aloysius Pieris*
Affiliation:
Tulana Research Center Kelaniya, Sri Lanka

Extract

The so-called “Oriental religions” dismissed only a century ago as primitive and pagan have registered in recent times a steep ascent to prominence not only in terms of their proven capacity to articulate the cultural ego of some of Asia's decolonized nations, but also as spiritual movements now seeping into Western cultures, threatening to be respectable alternatives to traditional Christianity. Disturbing news of Western youth streaming into Asia like a river flowing backward to its source is given wide coverage in the media.

Type
Editorial Essay
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Parrinder, Geoffrey, The Christian Debate: Light from the East (London: Gollancz, 1964), p. 22.Google Scholar

2 Cox, Harvey, Turning East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977).Google Scholar

3 Merton, Thomas, “Marxism and Monastic Perspective” in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, Burton, Naomi, Hart, Brother Patrick, and Laughlin, James, eds. (New York: New Directions, 1975), pp. 326–43.Google Scholar

4 King, Ursula, “Teilhard's Comparison of Western and Eastern Mysticism,” The Teilhard Review 11 (1975), 13.Google Scholar

5 de Chardin, Teilhard, How I Believe (New York: Harper & Row, 1969);Google ScholarRadhakrishnan, S., East and West in Religion (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1933), pp. 4670;Google ScholarJung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: East and West (New York: Pantheon, 1958);Google ScholarZaehner, R. C., Foolishness to the Greeks (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), p. 17.Google Scholar

6 The History of Christian Spirituality, Part I: The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers, Bouyer, Louis, ed. (London: Burns & Oates, 1963), pp. 1516.Google Scholar

7 Gilkey, Langdon, Religion and the Scientific Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 7677.Google Scholar

8 Kerr, Fergus, “The Need for Philosophy in Theology Today,” New Blackfriars 65/768 (June 1984), 248–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See Pieris, Aloysius, Asian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), pp. 103–04.Google Scholar

10 Thurston, Bonnie, “Thomas Merton on the Contemplative Life: An Analysis,” Contemplative Review 17 (1984), 2.Google Scholar

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., pp. 5-6.

13 Ibid., p. 4.