This is a book about dialogue, specifically about the dialogue between religions. But it is also a book formed in dialogue. I seek to bring together the two sides of my experience as an academic teacher and pastoral worker: on the one hand, the extraordinary world of the religions that is such an important feature of contemporary Western culture; on the other, my spiritual formation and religious practice which has acted as the primary motivation for everything that I do as a Jesuit priest.
The book can be read both as a practical correlate to what I have written elsewhere on the theology of religions, and, at a more personal level, as a reflection on my experience on the streets, as it were. I am guided throughout by the conviction that Christian faith comes truly alive when it is communicated, brought into dialogue with what is other different, even strange. God s own story, what God seeks to reveal of God s own self through the witness of the Bible, enters into dialogue with the story of one Jesuit who seeks to respond to the mystery of a loving God through the lens of Ignatian spirituality. The twelve linked chapters form a personal introduction, with a degree of autobiography and illustrative anecdote, to an interior dialogue between Christian faith and the challenging context of contemporary religious pluralism.