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Teologia mistică în dialogul islamo-creștin: Chiara Lubich, Andrei Scrima și autori clasici din cultura persiană și arabă – proiect finanțat prin granturile de excelență Hasso Plattner (LBUS-HPI-ERG-2020)
Mystical Theology in the Muslim-Christian Dialogue: Chiara Lubich, Andrei Scrima and Classical Persian and Arab Authors – a project financed through Hasso Plattner grants (LBUS-HPI-ERG-2020)
Religions – and especially through the competition between Islam and Christianity – play an important part in many current conflicts. Possible means for conflict resolution must be pursued on many levels, and one of them is the dialogue between religious traditions, but this dialogue can be successful only if it takes religious experiences seriously in their claim to truth. One form of religious expression, that is not of a fundamentalist type, but combines a strong connection to one’s own tradition with genuine openness to dialogue is mysticism. Islam has a long tradition of mystical writings (Rumi, ‘Attar, Ibn ‘Arabi), which play a special role in Sufism. Christian writings of mystical thinkers (André Scrima) and with a mystical spirituality (Chiara Lubich) are possible bridges for the Christian-Islamic dialogue. This project will analyze for the first time the writings of the aforementioned authors in light of themes that are usually points of dissention in the Islamic-Christian dialogue – such as the image of God in the crucifixion, the trinity versus the strong monotheistic Islamic godhead. This analysis will be led by a team of interreligious scholars, making thus Islamic-Christian dialogue not only a research topic, but part of the research method of the project itself. This unprecedented research will enable the identification of mystical elements of the representation of God that facilitate inter-faith dialogue, rather than hinder it.