Three Mystics Walk into a Tavern

James C. Harrington, a human rights lawyer of forty-one years, is founder and director of the non-profit Texas Civil Rights Project. He was adjunct professor at the University of Texas Law School for twenty-seven years. He is author of Wrestling with Free Speech, Religious Freedom, and Democracy in Turkey. Harrington writes and speaks widely on human rights and civil society.Sidney G. Hall III, is an activist, ordained minister, and writer. He has served for twenty-seven years as the senior pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church, a progressive congregation in central Austin. Hall is author of Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul’s Theology. He is a frequent speaker and workshop leader in the areas of nature-based Christianity, Holocaust studies, and LGBTQ inclusion in the church.

• ForewordIntroductory Comments—A Tavern?Chapter 1. What This Book Is—And Is Not—AboutEveryone Can Be a MysticRestless HeartsChapter 2. They Meet at Taverna degli Alighieri in VeniceChapter 3. Mysticism: For Everyone?Trying to Define the IndefinableMysticism Back on StageOne River, Many WellsHistorical NotesCharacteristicsDangers of MysticismChapter 4. The 13th and Early 14th Centuries as BackdropChristianity in EuropeThe MongolsCulture, Education, and LawPolitical Events13th-Century InventionsConcluding CommentsChapter 5. Jalal ad-Din Rumi TeachingsMajor WorksOrder of Whirling DervishesLegacyChapter 6. Meister Eckhart InfluenceWorks and TeachingsModern SpiritualityChapter 7. Moses de León The ZoharThe Zohar and KabbalahConcluding CommentsChapter 8. The Conversation Continues, About the DivineChapter 9. More Tea, Wine, and Conversation: This Time, About Religion and Whether It Helps or HindersChapter 10. Still More Çay and Conversation: The

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 doorway—into 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.