Authors
Jean-Pierre Lafouge
Jean-Pierre LaFouge is Associate Professor of French at Marquette University. His academic career took him to the United States where he obtained a Ph.D. in French literature, specializing in nineteenth and seventeen century French and Orientalist Literature. He is the author of several articles dealing with the relationship between art, Orientalism, philosophy and literature. Jean-Pierre LaFouge has also published a book on Eugène Fromentin and is presently assisting in the revision of French to English translations of the writings of Frithjof Schuon. He is also the editor of For God’s Greater Glory: Gems Of Jesuit Spirituality .
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M. Ali Lakhani
M. Ali Lakhani graduated from Cambridge University before moving to Vancouver where he has practiced as a trial lawyer for 25 years. In 1998, he founded the traditionalist journal, Sacred Web, with the aim of identifying the first principles of traditional metaphysics and promoting their application to the contingent circumstances of modernity. The bi-annual journal has included contributions by many leading traditionalists. In the words of Professor Nasr, “Along with Sophia, Sacred Web is the most important journal in the English language devoted to the study of tradition.”
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Louis Lallemant
Louis Lallemant (1587-1635) was a French Jesuit who is known today mainly for his Doctrine Spirituelle, a collection of maxims and instructions gathered together by Fr Jean Rigoleuc, one of his disciples, which details very thoroughly his spiritual method. His work is featured in For God’s Greater Glory.
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Patrick Laude
Patrick Laude is a writer, editor, professor, and researcher in the fields of language, literature, symbolism, and mysticism. He is a professor at Georgetown University, currently at their School of Foreign Service in Qatar. Laude’s writings have been published in the US and Europe in numerous journals.
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Bernard Leach
As the author of one of the most enduring manuals about pottery, A Potter’s Book, Bernard Leach was a world famous studio potter who also taught and lectured around the world. He had extensive international experience with Japanese, Chinese and English pottery traditions. In 1977, there was a Retrospective Exhibition of Mr. Leach’s work held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Leach contributed his essay, “Integration”, for the book Every Man An Artist .
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Henri Le Saux
Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda), 1910-1973, was a French Benedictine monk, author, and a “bridge between Hindu and Christian spirituality.” In 1948 he moved to India and assisted in establishing a Christian ashram in southern India. He was later associated with Father Bede Griffiths at Saccidananda Ashram. Abhishiktananda spent the later years of his life as a wandering monk, eventually founding a hermitage on the banks of the Ganges in the Himalayas. Books containing Le Saux’s work include: UL REMOVED
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Franklin Lewis
Franklin Lewis is Associate Professor of Persian in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a Deputy Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, and past President of the American Institute of Iranian Studies. His research focuses on Persian and Arabic literature and philology, comparative literature and translation theory, Islamic Studies, Sufism, and Baha’i Studies. Prof. Lewis contributed the essay “Towards a Chronology of the Poems in the Dīvān-i Shams: A Prolegomenon for a Periodization of Rumi’s Literary Oeuvre” to the volume The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition.
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C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland on November 29, 1898. He was attending Oxford college in 1917 when he joined the British army to fight in World War One. In 1925, he became Fellow of Language and Literature at Oxford. Author of the famous Narnia chronicles, as well as numerous books about Christianity, his writings have been some of the most read books of all time. Lewis became a Professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University. He died in 1963. Among his works, Lewis contributed to Ye Shall Know the Truth , published by World Wisdom.
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Leonard Lewisohn
Leonard Lewisohn is a scholar and author who specializes in classical Persian and Sufi literature. He is Senior Lecturer in Persian at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK. Dr. Lewisohn is the editor of the upcoming World Wisdom volume (December 2014), The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition, a groundbreaking collection of 13 essays on Rumi by many of the world’s leading authorities in the fields of Islamic Studies and Persian Literature, in which they explore the major religious themes in Rumi’s poetry and teachings.
Professor Lewisohn has also contributed the essay “‘Ali ibn Abi Talib’s Ethics of Mercy in the Mirror of the Persian Sufi Tradition” to the World Wisdom book The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam: The Teachings of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib .Read More
Tage Lindbom
Tage Lindbom was born in Sweden in 1909. He was one of the intellectual architects of the Swedish Welfare State, but after World War II, he started to have serious doubts about the cause he promoted. He underwent a slow, but profound intellectual and spiritual change. In 1962 he published The Windmills of Sancho Panza a book that rejected the assumptions behind Social Democracy and related movements. After breaking with his past, Lindbom published many books in Sweden, most of which explore the tension between religion and modern secular ideology. Two of his books have appeared in English. The first was The Tares and the Good Grain (1983) and the second was The Myth of Democracy (1996).
Tage Lindbom’s essay “Lucifer” appears in World Wisdom’s anthology Every Branch in Me: Essays on the Meaning of Man, and “Virtue and Morality” is included in The Underlying Religion.Read More
Martin Lings
Martin Lings (1909-2005) was a leading member of the “Traditionalist” or “Perennialist” school and an acclaimed author, editor, translator, scholar, Arabist, and poet whose work centers on the relationship between God and man through religious doctrine, scripture, symbolism, literature, and art. He was an accomplished metaphysician and essayist who often turned to the world’s great spiritual traditions for examples, though he is probably best known for his writings on Islam and its esoteric tradition, Sufism.
Dr. Lings co-edited The Underlying Religion (2007) with Clinton Minnar. This book is a survey of central perennialist ideas and authors. Dr Lings contributed the following essays to various World Wisdom books:Read More
Roger Lipsey
Roger Lipsey is an art historian, editor and author. Dr. Lipsey has written on a wide range of topics and intellectual figures, but his greatest contributions to the body of perennialist literature are undoubtedly the three volumes he edited of the works of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (Coomaraswamy, Bollingen series, Princeton University Press, c1977). Lipsey has been called the “leading authority on the life and work of Coomaraswamy” as a result of this monumental task. As an author, his most recent books have been Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton, and Have You Been to Delphi?: Tales of the Ancient Oracle for Modern Minds.
As a leading authority on A. K. Coomaraswamy, Dr. Lipsey has contributed the “Introduction” to Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought? The Traditional View of Art: Revised Edition with Previously Unpublished Author’s Notes by Coomaraswamy, edited by William Wroth.Read More
Alexander Lipski
Dr. Alexander Lipski (1919-09), was Professor of History and Religious Studies from 1958 to 1984 at California State University, Long Beach. Dr. Lipski wrote several books on some major religious figures, Thomas Merton and Asia: His Quest for Utopia, Essays on Carmelite Saints, and Life and Teaching of Sri Anandamayi Ma. He also edited the collection Bengal: East and West. Dr. Lipski also wrote many essays on history and religion that were published in various journals. The text of his book on Sri Anandamayi Ma was incorporated into the illustrated book The Essential Sri Anandamayi Ma.
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Arvol Looking Horse
Arvol Looking Horse was born on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. At the age of 12, he was given the responsibility of becoming the 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, the sacred pipe of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Nations. He is widely recognized as a chief and the spiritual leader of all three branches of the Sioux tribe.
Arvol Looking Horse is the author of White Buffalo Teachings and a guest columnist for Indian Country Today. A tireless advocate of maintaining traditional spiritual practices, Chief Looking Horse is the founder of the Big Foot Riders, a group which memorializes the massacre of Big Foot’s band at Wounded Knee. He lives on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota.
Film interviews with Arvol Looking Horse on spirituality, tribal history, and advice for American Indian youth are a featured part of the documentary film and DVD on the Sun Dance entitled Native Spirit: The Sun Dance Way . An illustrated book, STARTLINKNative Spirit: The Sun Dance Way, by Thomas Yellowtail, also features the words of Arvol Looking Horse.Read More
Joseph E. B. Lumbard
Joseph Lumbard is the founder of The Islamic Research Institute and is currently Assistant Professor of Classical Islam at Brandeis University. He is a specialist in Sufism and Islamic Philosophy, and has had numerous articles published in journals of traditionalism, comparative religion, and philosophy. In the wake of September 11, 2001, Dr. Lumbard founded the Islamic Research Institute (IRI) to provide a forum in which Muslim scholars are able to contextualize issues pertaining to Islam and apply the traditional teachings of Islam to the exigencies of modern life.Dr. Joseph Lumbard has edited the award-winning book Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition (revised edition) for World Wisdom.
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Oren Lyons
Oren R. Lyons is a traditional Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, and a member of the Onondoga Nation Council of Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee). He is Associate Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the State University of New York in Buffalo. Lyons co-founded and publishesDaybreak, a national American Indian quarterly news magazine. He also edited the book Exiled In The Land Of The Free: Democracy, The Iroquois and The Constitution (1992), and is an accomplished illustrator and painter.An essay from Oren Lyons, “Our Mother Earth,” is included in Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred .
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