Book Description

Vol.3, No.1 of Culture and Dialogue is a Special Issue in many ways. This issue marks the takeover by a new publisher. Because of contractual constraints and practical reasons the decision was made to continue our journey with Cambridge Scholars Publishing, whose great enthusiasm foreshadows a bright future for the journal. Our words of thanks, however, must also go to Airiti Press without which the journal would not have seen the light of day. We are indebted to Airiti Press for having invested into the launch of a new journal, with all the risks entailed, and for their dedicated hard work. We are most grateful for this. The Journal was officially launched in March 2011 and has since produced four issues, all of which focusing on a particular facet of dialogical practice within the field of culture, be it philosophy, art, or politics. Forthcoming issues will offer platforms to explore how dialogue impacts on the shaping of identity, aesthetic meaning, and historical significance. One issue will also be devoted to how dialogue manifests itself in language. This brings us to autumn 2015, after which other pressing themes will, no doubt, be proposed and treated. In whatever case, the thread remains the cultural forms of dialogue; many of us know how critical ignorance about the nature of the dialogue can be, in all fields, at all levels. Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia once wrote that “To be someone is solitude.” Any self-felt genius or world-leading mortal will identify with this. The solitude at stake is that of the one who fails to link with others, or an Other, by denying the possibility to relinquish some of him or herself. In fact, the true someone is never alone; the true someone never leads. This is the message Culture and Dialogue is striving to convey, express, or analyse in its various forms across the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. Besides, the Journal has always sought, when possible, to preserve a certain spirit of writing in addition to academic rigour and creativity – a spirit that is undeniably fading in the midst of the publish or perish ethos adopted by advanced techno-capitalist systems of education in some parts of the world. Vol.3, No.1 is a Special Issue devoted to the theme of “religion and dialogue.” Cosimo Zene, of the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, kindly accepted our invitation to be the Guest Editor, and our words of thanks must first go to him. Cosimo has managed to bring together a range of outstanding essays of which the Journal can only be proud. To various degrees and in different ways all essays discuss dialogue and religion, or show dialogue at work in religious studies. We are most grateful to all the authors who generously contributed to this Special Issue and therefore to the life of the Journal; in alphabetical order, T.H. Barrett, Stephen Chan, Jan-Peter Hartung, Sîan Hawthorne, Catherine Heszer, Tullio Lobetti, Theodore Proferes, and Cosimo Zene.