Name Alexander Masovianus | Education University of Chicago | |
Alexander Masovianus, in full: Alexander Ioseph Masovianus (born 26 February 1955) is an American comparative religionist and spiritual thinker.
Masovianus was educated at the University of Chicago, Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago, McCormick Theological Seminary, Catholic Theological Union, and Princeton Theological Seminary. After an early interest in mysticism (bolstered by a series of research trips, including several months’ sojourn on Mount Athos in 1982), his personal views underwent an evolution in the 1990s, taking him out of the conventional fold of organized Christianity and placing him squarely among the sympathizers of the philosophia perennis (which include such people as René Guénon and Marco Pallis), though in his case with a pronounced Sufi bias. (This is evident from the lectures presented by him at various academic centers, particularly in Asia, and from interviews given to the press.) In 1999 he founded the Global Forum on Religion, Spirituality, and God, a research center in Kyoto, Japan, intended to facilitate in-depth studies of world religions along comparative lines. Newspaper reports published in 2004 forecast the appearance of Love and the Human, a much-anticipated work in comparative ethics.