The second Asia Pacific Theological Encounter Programme (APTEP) will be held from April 10 to May 8, 2012. Conducted by the Indonesian Jesuits, the one-month programme on “Dialogue with Muslims” was first held in 2011. It was born from the positive successful immersion programme conducted in 2009 with 18 Indonesian Jesuit scholastics living in an Islamic boarding school (pesantren) for two weeks.
Videos from The Ricci Legacy Symposium held in Hong Kong in December 2010 are now available online.
The four-day symposium on inculturation was collaboration between Xavier House Spiritual Formation Centre in Hong Kong and Georgetown University in the United States. The 300 participants – about 100 from mainland China – heard 10 international experts, including Georgetown’s Fr Howard Gray, SJ, reflect on cultural adaptation of the Gospel and Ignatian Spirituality.
Father General Adolfo Nicolás SJ speaks to The Way about Interreligious Dialogue: The Experience of some Pioneer Jesuits in Asia.
Before becoming Superior General of the Jesuits in 2008, Adolfo Nicolás worked for many years in Asia. Here he draws on that experience to argue for the contemporary emergence of a new paradigm for the work of spreading the gospel, that of ‘evangelisation-through-dialogue’. He finds seeds of this in the work of the first Jesuits in that continent, seeds that at the time failed to flourish in an unprepared world.
A forum entitled Theological Views on Religions and Cultures by jointly held by Ateneo de Manila University’s Loyola School of Theology and Heythrop College’s Centre for Christianity and Interreligious Dialogue in Manila from July 21 to 23, 2011. Br. Bernard Falzon mssp provides an account of the three-day event.
Ateneo de Davao University (ADDU) has approved the establishment of the ADDU Al Qalam Institute: An Institute for Islamic Identities and Dialogue.
In the spirit of inter-religious dialogue, a recent symposium for Jesuit scholars of Buddhism began with an Aarti or ‘lamp lighting’ ceremony.
INDONESIA – A group of young Catholics, Muslims and Protestants in Yogyakarta have emerged from a peace-building workshop in July inspired to be agents of peace. They will be organizing activities to encourage interfaith dialogue and understanding such as visits to religious institutions and celebrations of religious festivals.
In this essay, after giving some background information, I present reflections on some of my own “psychological” experiences of doing Zen over the last 35 years. I use the word “psychological” to differentiate these experiences from authentic Zen experiences. – Fr Jerry Cusumano, S.J.
Few Christians are willing to admit that Islam has an important contribution to make to world peace, yet the enormous problems faced by the modern world necessitate cooperation and respect between the different faiths, says Australian Jesuit and Islamic scholar Fr Herman Roborgh.
Fr Franz Magnis-Suseno (IDO) was born as Count von Magnis in 1936 in Silesia, Germany. In 1955 he became a Jesuit priest and later went to Indonesia, where he still lives and works as a priest and university professor. In 1997 Father Magnis-Suseno, who studied theology, philosophy and politics and had by then obtained a doctorate in theology, took out citizenship in his adopted country and chose the additional Javanese name of Suseno. In 2001 he was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was interviewed in early January by representatives of the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).