Heart openings: The experience and cultivation of love in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam

Scholarship has not responded satisfactorily to the current crisis of interreligious misunderstanding, sectarian strife, and rising fundamentalism. Ethical attempts to respect difference have resulted in reifications and the encouragement of difference.

Could the kinds of experiences that scholars and practitioners call religious, divine, spiritual, or mystical share a ""common core""?

Notwithstanding that this old hypothesis has been rejected by scholars as a universalization of Western and Christian concepts of experience and religion, this project sets out to investigate the possibility of undisclosed commonalities with a new set of methods.

The project specifically focuses on the experience and cultivation of love in religious, spiritual, and contemplative practice; first among Tibetan Buddhists, Pentecostals, and Sufis in Denmark; secondly with Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal, Pentecostals in Papua New Guinea, and Sufis in Egypt.

In this endeavour the project takes on the central anthropological task of comparing not only things that look alike but also phenomena which are seemingly dissimilar.

Through audiovisual and microphenomenological methods of experiential elicitation, the project will examine in minute detail the synchronic and diachronic structures of concrete experiences of love including the complex sensory and emotional qualities of such experiences and the micro-acts and micro-events that may be involved as they unfold.

Furthermore, through participant observation and life history interviews the project will examine how such experiences of love impact upon and emerge from people's everyday practices, how research participants themselves understand the ways in which such experiences shape their lives, and how different life trajectories may relate to particular experiences.

By combining these methods the project will pave the way for new interreligious understandings based on in-depth experiential detail that has not been achieved before.