DIALOGUE THAT EXPANDS THE HEART

The creation of a new journal devoted to the dialogue of religious experience and practice was first proposed in October 2008 at the annual meeting of the European coordinators of DIMMID. Father Pierre de Béthune OSB, the first Secretary General of DIMMID whom I had succeeded the previous year, said that he believed the time had come for the International Bulletin of DIMMID to evolve into a journal devoted to the dialogue of religious experience and practice. His suggestion received the support of the European coordinators and the coordinators of other commissions whom I consulted, and I began to form a planning committee.

Thanks to a grant DIMMID received from a supporter of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue who wishes to remain anonymous, the planning committee, composed of Pierre de Béthune OSB, Cipriano Carini OSB, who was then coordinator of the Italian commission , Daniel Pont OSB, coordinator of the European commissions, Paolo Trianni, professor at Sant’Anselmo and the Gregorian University in Rome,  Fabrice Blée,  professor at Saint Paul University Ottawa and historian of DIMMID,  and myself were able to meet twice, once in Rome in February 2009, and then in Brussels in November of the same year. In October 2010 the editorial board had its first meeting in London.

Our most important tasks were to define the mission of this new journal, give it a name that would express its mission, determine its format and content, and establish an editorial board and a board of advisors. We seriously considered the pros and cons of publishing Dilatato Corde as an on-line rather than a printed journal. We recognize that many monastic communities still do not have easy access to the Internet, and we also know that many people who do use the Internet prefer to read from a book rather than from a computer screen. However, the costs of printing and mailing an international journal, the ever increasing number of people (including those in monasteries!) who rely on the Internet for information, the relative ease of publishing on-line, and the availability of on-line translation services indicated to us that the on-line option was the better one for Dilatato Corde, a journal that is both international and multi-lingual.

However, Dilatato Corde will also be available in print. Thanks to the availability of print-on-demand publishing, each year the articles that appeared in Dilatato Corde during the previous year will be published in book form by Lantern Books in New York.

Issues about format and language are important, but they are secondary to those of content. Dilatato Corde is a journal about the ways interreligious dialogue affects religious experience and religious practice. That is why the first section of the journal is devoted to testimonies, reflections, and reports. We want Dilatato Corde to be the place one goes to learn how peoples’ spiritual lives are being enriched by interreligious dialogue, to learn about the ways their hearts are being expanded by their exposure to the beliefs and practices of other spiritual seekers. The accounts of such experience will, in turn, provide the raw data for scholars who are striving to understand what interreligious dialogue at the level of spiritual experience and practice means theologically and philosophically. That is why the second section of Dilatato Corde is devoted to “Studies,” that is, scholarly, peer-reviewed articles on the theology, the spirituality, and the history of the dialogue of religious experience.

We urge all who are drawn to this new journal to send us testimonies, reflections, and reports about how their hearts have been expanded and their spiritual life deepened by inter- and intra-religious dialogue with another spiritual tradition. These spiritual experiences need not be dramatic or extraordinary. In fact, as Frère Ivo Dujardin proposes in his article on interreligious dialogue at Tiberhine, “ordinary” and “daily” spiritual experiences shaped by interreligious dialogue are really the more valuable, for they go deeper and are more enduring. These experiences will, in turn, provide scholars data to examine and reflect on, and thus help us all better appreciate the promise—and the challenge—of interreligious dialogue in today’s world.