LAUSR

At the American Academy of Religion in November 2015, my co-panelists Ruben Habito and Andre Delbecq and I each reported on different aspects of an interfaith Buddhist-Christian retreat based on The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola for a panel titled “Buddhist and Ignatian Spiritualities—Points of Intersection and Dialogue.” The three-day retreat was held at Santa Clara University in February 2014, and all panelists attended. The retreat itself was based on Ignatius and the Buddha in Conversation: A Resource for a Religiously Plural Dialog Juxtaposing the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius and Buddhist Wisdom (henceforth referred to interchangeably either as Ignatius and the Buddha in Conversation or the resource), co-authored by Andre Delbecq, Len Tischler, Juan Velasco, Bo Tep, and myself. The origins of this Ignatius and the Buddha and a brief report on the retreat by Delbecq and Tischler have already been described in an earlier issue of Buddhist-Christian Studies, so that will not be addressed in my paper.1 My task on the panel was to report on the fruits of the retreat and my own personal involvement in this retreat and the interfaith context at Santa Clara University, which is a private, Jesuit university. This paper expands on that theme and embeds these fruits within the larger context of contemplative/interior dialogue as a form of interreligious dialogue as well as briefly exploring the current state of Buddhist-Christian retreats for laypeople and specifically Jesuit efforts in this area both at Jesuit universities and in other settings with a focus primarily on Zen. First, I will report on the fruits of our specific retreat and then go into the larger context of Buddhist-Christian retreats at this time. On February 13, 2014, Buddhist and Catholic practitioners gathered in the Multifaith Sanctuary in St. Joseph’s Hall at Santa Clara University to embark upon a three-day religiously plural retreat conference titled “Ignatius and the Buddha in