The reader cannot help but join in the conversation, and not only because it is a conversation and not a treatise, a dialogue, and not a lecture. We join in because the conversation talks to the conditions and issues of today, in part through voices that speak today, in the present tense, and not only those that speak out of some misty distant past. The threads of this volume are woven together in a richly hued, tight, and very readable tapestry. The tapestry is also a doorwayinto the warmest of intellectual and spiritual taverns, into which all of us are invited, out of the dark, windy night of the everyday world and its complications. The wise reader will read beginning to end, hardly stopping for breath, inspired. -- Ori Z. Soltes, Georgetown University, author of Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Searching for Oneness
