Founded 1974 Type Educational Charity Location London, UK | Founder D M Matheson CBE Registration no. 284155 | |
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Focus Comparative religion, Religious symbolism, Perennial philosophy, Theology and Metaphysics | ||
The Matheson Trust is an educational charity based in London dedicated to further and disseminate the study of comparative religion, especially from the point of view of the underlying harmony of the major religious and philosophical traditions of the world.
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History
The Matheson Trust was established in London in 1974 by Donald Macleod Matheson CBE (1896-1979), who in addition to his work as a civil servant was active as a translator of Perennialist works, most notably Understanding Islam by Frithjof Schuon and An Introduction to Sufi Doctrine by Titus Burckhardt.
Registered as a UK charity in 1982, the trust was for years active sponsoring academic research, lectures, film production and publications. As of January 2011 they have launched a new series of paperback publications, the Matheson Monographs, and a public website hosting the Matheson Library.
Matheson Trust associates have included, among others, Martin Lings, Charles Le Gai Eaton, William Stoddart and Reza Shah-Kazemi.
Matheson Monographs
Since 2008, The Matheson Trust had been co-producing publications with a number of kindred organisations and established publishers: The Prometheus Trust, Fons Vitae (KY), Archetype UK, but December 2010 saw the launch of an independent series, the "Matheson Monographs", covering "scriptural exegesis, the modalities of spiritual and contemplative life, studies of particular religious traditions, comparative analyses, studies of traditional arts, crafts and cosmological sciences, contemporary scholarly expositions of religious philosophy and metaphysics, translations of both classical and contemporary texts and transcriptions of lectures by, and interviews with, spiritual and scholarly authorities from different religious and philosophical traditions".
Matheson Library
In March 2011 the Matheson Trust website was launched, hosting an online library of free selected books and articles, almost exclusively in English, including authors and sources as varied as Shaykh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Berzin archives, Charles, Prince of Wales, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, James Cutsinger, Gavin D'Costa, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Harry Oldmeadow, the journal Sacred Web, Huston Smith, Timothy Winter (Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad), The Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths and others. Documents are free to browse and download, most in PDF format, with a few articles in HTML.
As of December 2015, there are more than 500 holdings in the library, more than a third of which are audio recordings.
Audio Library
One of the purported aims of the Matheson Library is to use existing contemporary media technologies to make available resources from ancient traditions, either in the form of recitation of traditional scriptures or in the scholarly transmission of the doctrines and insights pertaining to the different religions. An ongoing hear! project is converting scholarly texts and other texts of interest into MP3 format, and making them available through the Audio section of the library. In April 2012 the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection was launched, a repository of selected liturgical audio recordings from the major religious traditions. This collection includes live recordings from temples and ritual gatherings around the world.