June 26, 2006

MINNEAPOLIS – In the newly-released The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery, Raimon Panikkar charts the paradoxes and possibilities of our experience of God. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from the Bible and Western mystics to the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, he probes human language and silence, adoration and alienation, to find the root of all our experience in God and its special character in Christian encounter with Jesus. He concludes with reflections on the many places – such as love, joy, suffering, pardon, nature, silence, and even evil – where we meet God today.

"In the context of Raimon Panikkar's massive life's work, this volume stands out as a theological meditation that is also a mystical hymn to the namelessness of God. The gift is Panikkar's ability to approach fundamental religious ideas with a new innocence, and to pierce beneath the façade of theological confusion, division, or laziness. There is an explosive force at work in his words ripping through the text, coloring it with hues and banging out harmonies that leave the reader wanting to probe more deeply and to understand more fully. The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery is a seamless garment of praise for the religious dimension of life, for the trinitarian structure of reality, and, most of all, for silence. " – Beverly Lanzetta, Research Scholar, Southwest Institute for Research on Women, University of Arizona and author of Radical Wisdom.

Table of Contents

Prologue

1. Speaking of God
Requires a prior interior silence
Has its own style Involves our whole being
Regards God alone
Needs the mediation of a belief
Regards symbol and not concept
Includes several meanings
Does not exhaust the divine
Leads back to a new silence

2. The experience of God
The silence of life
Constituents of the experience
Faith, acts of faith, and belief
The triple horizon of divinity Fragments on the experience of God Of initiation Passive attitude: yin

3. Christian experience of God
Three visions of God and world
Conceiving the divine
Distinguishing Christ and Jesus
Identification and identity
Three texts
Jesus of Nazareth

4. Privileged places of the experience of God Love
The thou
Joy
Suffering
Evil
Pardon
Crucial moments
Nature
Silence
Propitious Places

Epilogue

Illustrations

The Experience of God, By Raimon Panikkar, Format: 5.5" x 8.5," paperback, 144 pp, ISBN: 0-8006-3825-5, Price: $16.00, Publisher: Fortress Press.

To order The Experience of God please call Fortress Press at 1-800-328-4648 or visit the Web site at http://www.fortresspress.com/.

Fortress Press