Authors

Michael Cardew

Michael Cardew, teacher and founder of numerous pottery organizations, including Vume Pottery, had extensive international experience with the arts and crafts of both Africa and England. In 1976, there was a retrospective exhibition organized by the British Craft Council that traveled to Europe with Mr. Cardew’s work on display. He also wrote Pioneer Pottery, an extremely important pottery manual which is still used today.

Michael Cardew’s article, “On Pottery and Potting” is included in the anthology Every Man an Artist , edited by Brian Keeble .

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Tantoo Cardinal

Tantoo Cardinal is considered by many as the world’s most widely recognized American Indian actress. Raised among the Cree, she turned her political activism into an acting career that has included roles as the knowing wife of the Medicine Man in “Dances With Wolves” (1990), the poignant childless companion of Rip Torn in “Where the Rivers Flow North” (1993) and the mother of Brad Pitt’s wife in “Legends of the Fall” (1994).Cardinal is the narrator of the World Wisdom documentary Native Spirit . Excerpts from an interview with her appear in Living in Two Worlds: The American Indian Experience.

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Arthur Graham Carey

Arthur Graham Carey wrote extensively on the perennial understanding of art from a Roman Catholic perspective. Many of his lectures and essays appeared in the Catholic Art Quarterly (later Good Works); others were published as pamphlets. The publisher Sophia Perennis at Universalis of Ghent, NY, is currently preparing a collection of his works for publication. His article, “The General Problem,” can be found in Every Man An Artist .

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Jane Fatima Casewit

Jane Fatima Casewit is a writer, translator, and educator who lives in Morocco. Her interests focus on comparative religion and traditionalist studies, particularly in the area of West African Islam and Sufism.She has published several articles on gender in the light of tradition, including “Islamic Cosmological Concepts of Femininity,” which can be found in The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity, edited by Kenneth (Harry) Oldmeadow. Mrs. Casewit also translated the French classic The Life and Teachings of Tierno Bokar by Amadou Hampaté Bâ for the World Wisdom edition, A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar.

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Patrick Casey

Patrick Casey served as an aide and secretary to Frithjof Schuon for over 20 years. After earning a degree in Religious Studies from Indiana University in 1975, Casey traveled to Switzerland to meet Schuon for the first time. In the early 1980s, after Schuon had moved to America, Casey approached him with the idea of collecting the letters he had sent over the years to correspondents in America, England, Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere. With Schuon’s approval, Casey began a process that resulted in the collection of more than 1,500 letters; many of these have since been published in various works, while some appear for the first time in the Appendix to Frithjof Schuon’s Echoes of Perennial Wisdom: A New Translation with Selected Letters, edited by Patrick Casey.

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Jennifer Casey

Jennifer Casey is an independent film maker and director who has traveled extensively throughout the Plain Indians reservations. A former teacher, Mrs. Casey has met with numerous tribal leaders and Sun Dance chiefs.

Jennifer Casey is the director of the following World Wisdom documentaries: Native Spirit and The Sun Dance Way, and Frithjof Schuon: Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy. She also wrote and directed the 49-minute documentary Origins of the Perennialist School, which can be viewed on our online videos page or on the World Wisdom YouTube Channel.

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Deborah Casey

Mrs. Casey has been with World Wisdom since 1981, and in her capacity as editor she had the opportunity to meet frequently with Frithjof Schuon for the publication of many of his books in English translation. Her current responsibilities involve working with other translators and editors on the translation and cataloging of Schuon’s correspondence and unpublished papers for the future use of interested readers and scholars.Mrs. Casey is the editor of Light on the Ancient Worlds, published by World Wisdom. Light on the Ancient Worlds is the first in a new series of Frithjof Schuon’s classical works which have been extensively revised and updated.

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Peter Chelkowski

Peter Chelkowski studied Oriental Philology at the Jagiellonian University, and Theater Arts at the School of Drama in the city of Cracow. Later, when he moved to England, he attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where he studied Islamic Middle East History and Culture. Later still, he went to Iran and studied Persian Literature with several distinguished professors and scholars at the University of Tehran. These experiences and his education in various countries with diverse languages and cultures contribute to and are reflected in his teaching and writings. Since 1968, he has been Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Prof. Chelkowski contributed the essay “From Rūmī’s Mathnawī to the Popular Stage,” co-written with Iraj Anvar, to the volume The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition.

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William Chittick

William C. Chittick is one of the most important contemporary translators and interpreters of Islamic mystical texts and poetry. He is a professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Among his publications are The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (1983), The Psalms of Islam (1988), The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-`Arabî’s Cosmology (1998), Sufism: A Short Introduction (2000), and The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Dîn Kâshânî (2001). World Wisdom titles featuring Dr. Chittick:

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Michel Chodkiewicz

Michel Chodkiewicz is the Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His teaching, research, translations, and writing focus on Sufism, particularly on the important figures of Ibn Arabi and his direct and indirect disciples.

His essay “The Vision of God According to Ibn Arabi” appears in Sufism: Love and Wisdom.

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Tayeb Chouiref

Tayeb Chouiref is a French scholar, translator and teacher. He is the author of The Spiritual Teachings of the Prophet (two volumes in French, 2008), an annotated collection of authoritative Prophetic traditions commented by Masters of Islamic spirituality. He is also the translator of several works of al-Ghazâlî. Chourief’s article “Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawî and the Universalism of the Quran” appears in The Universal Dimensions of Islam.

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Rev. Dr. John Chryssavgis

The Rev. Dr. John Chryssavgis is a Greek Orthodox clergyman, author, educator, and theologian. He is currently Archdeacon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The Reverend Archdeacon has specialized in, among other areas, the study of the early Church Fathers and Mothers, theology and environmental issues, and inter-faith matters. The Rev. Dr. John Chryssavgis is the author of twenty books and numerous articles in several languages on the Church Fathers and Orthodox Spirituality. He has contributed to several collections published by World Wisdom and is the author of the award-winning book In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Revised. He is also co-author (with Marilyn Rouvelas) of an illustrated children’s book, Saint Anthony the Great.

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Cecil Collins

Cecil Collins, writer, teacher and artist explored many visions in his art. His major essay ‘The Vision of the Fool’ was first published in 1947. Mr. Collins had numerous exhibitions throughout his lifetime, including a major Retrospective Exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London in 1989. Another essay that he wrote, “Why does Art today lack inspiration?”, is featured in Every Man An Artist .

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Claude de la Colombière

Claude de la Colombière (1641-1682) was born of noble parentage in France in 1641 and died at Paray-le-Monial, in 1682. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1659. In 1674 he was made superior at the Jesuit house at Paray-le-Monial, where he became the spiritual director of Saint Margaret Mary and was thereafter a zealous apostle of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Two of his texts appear in the World Wisdom anthology For God’s Greater Glory: the first one is Parts IV and V of The Secret of Peace and Happiness, by Fr Jean Baptiste Saint-Juré and Fr St Claude Colombière, S.J., while the second is a selection of themes taken from The Spiritual Direction of Saint Claude de la Colombière.

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Brian Coman

Brian Coman is a former research biologist who worked for the Department of Natural Resources and Environment in Victoria, Australia. As well as numerous scientific publications, he is the author of Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia (1999). He has also published a number of essays, mainly in Quadrant. Dr Coman is currently enrolled as a postgraduate research student at La Trobe University, Bendigo, where his doctoral thesis argues a defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition against the criticisms of contemporary ecological historians.Dr Coman’s article “Never say die … without a cause” can be found in The Betrayal of Tradition, edited by Kenneth Oldmeadow.

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Rama P. Coomaraswamy

Dr. Rama P. Coomaraswamy (1929-2006), son of the renowned perennialist writer Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, was in his own right an important writer on traditionalist topics, especially regarding Christianity and the influx of modernistic ideas and practices in this ancient apostolic tradition.Dr. Coomaraswamy wrote what to our knowledge is the most detailed study of the modern changes to the Catholic rites and doctrines. This unrelenting analysis of the errors of modern insertions into Catholic tradition was originally published in 1972 but recently updated in a new edition in The Destruction of the Christian Tradition: Updated and Revised. He also collaborated with World Wisdom as the editor of The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy; in addition, several of his important essays on Christianity, and Tradition, have been included in other World Wisdom collections.

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Jean C. Cooper

Informed by the perspective of the Perennial Philosophy, J. C. Cooper wrote and lectured extensively on the subjects of philosophy, comparative religion, and symbolism. She was the author of a wide range of books on spiritual topics, including Taoism, the Way of the Mystic, Yin and Yang, and Symbolism, the Universal Language, but is perhaps best known for her classic reference work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols.J. C. Cooper’s writing is represented in “The Symbolism of the Taoist Garden” in Light from the East: Eastern Wisdom for the Modern West and “The Yin and the Yang in Nature” in Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred. World Wisdom will publish a collection of her essays, along with beautiful Taoist art, in An Illustrated Introduction to Taoism, in 2010.

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Vincent Cornell

Vincent Cornell is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989. Throughout the next decade, he taught at a number of prominent universities before becoming a Professor of History and Director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas. His pre-modern interests cover the entire spectrum of Islamic thought from Sufism to philosophy and Islamic law. Mr. Cornell is the author of the foreword to The Path of Muhammad.

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James Cowan

James Cowan is an Australian philosopher, novelist, traveler and “cultural adventurer” whose work explores the continuum between past, present and future. He is best-known for a series of works on the culture and spiritual heritage of the Australian Aborigines, including Mysteries of the Dreaming (1989) and Myths of the Dreaming (1994), and for his prize-winning novels which include A Mapmaker’s Dream (1996) and A Troubadour’s Testament (1998). He recently spent several years in Italy where he completed Francis: A Saint’s Way (2001). His article “Towards a New Dreaming” can be found in The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity , edited by Harry Oldmeadow.

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Keith Critchlow

Prof. Keith Critchlow is the cofounder of the journal Temenos, as well as the author of numerous books on sacred geometry, including Order in Space and Time Stands Still. He is Professor Emeritus at The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London, and a former professor of Islamic Art at the Royal College of Art. Dr. Critchlow, a leading expert in sacred architecture, also founded Kairos, a society that investigates, studies, and promotes traditional values of art and science.For World Wisdom, Dr. Crithchlow has written the forewords to: UL REMOVED

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Stephen Cross

Stephen Cross is on the Academic Board of the Temenos Academy and writes and lectures on aspects of Indian and European thought. In 1976 he produced a widely seen television series, The Traditional World of Islam, working closely with Titus Burckhardt, S.H. Nasr and other perennialists. He is currently completing a study of Schopenhauer’s philosphy in relation to Indian thought; earlier books include Elements of Hinduism and (as joint author) Inward Lies the Way: German Thought and the Nature of Mind. Stephen Cross is the author of the article Coomaraswamy, St. Augustine, and the Perennial Philosophy, which appears in the World Wisdom title Crossing Religious Frontiers.

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Edward S. Curtis

Born in 1868 near Whitewater, Wisconsin, Edward Sheriff Curtis became one of America’s finest photographers and ethnologists. Beginning in 1907, he began the publishing of his epic masterpiece, The North American Indian. Upon its completion in 1930, Curtis’ opus, entitled The North American Indian, consisted of 20 volumes, each containing 75 hand-pressed photogravures and 300 pages of text. Each volume was accompanied by a corresponding portfolio containing at least 36 photogravures.

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