Fifteen years ago at a seminar in Kyoto two Christians of the East but "oriented"—dare I say it?—toward the West got into an intense argument about a point of doctrine. They soon picked up allies from among others in the Christian minority at the session.

Put off by the fracas, my wife mentioned at recess over tea that for several days she had been moved by the serenity, generosity, and clarity of expression of one of the seminarists. With a bit of a wink she said, "He strikes me as being the most exemplary Christian in the room." She was not, I think, baptizing him terminologically or being imperial about where among the religions goodness lies. She was working through a process in which we were both learning something new about the "other."

Later in the day we developed our acquaintance with the scholar, from what school of Buddhism he derived I do not know. We asked him to elaborate on it, and he gave us a document that had, as I recall, mainly white space on the first page. It went something like this:

Oh! I read on in a longer Chapter Two how this Buddhist outlook has no subject, nor object. Ego and non-ego were one and the same.

I doubt whether his document made it home with us. But just as the whole Kyoto experience brought us to a new horizon, the encounter with this scholar stayed in my mind. Elements of the considerations he was eliciting stay in the recesses of my consciousness, to be brought forward when I read articles like those in this Bulletin. I hope that these writings do for you what they do for me: dispel some of the haze on that horizon, invite new encounters, and prompt reconsiderations.

Of course, it is expecting a great deal if any of that is to happen thanks to our short articles. Let them represent opportunities to enlarge my vistas, to welcome unanticipated experiences, and, yes, to reconsider approaches to reality that I had taken for granted. To the point: such occasions come with the territory to which the Park Ridge Center devotes itself. It was designed to be "interfaith, interdisciplinary, intercultural" and a few more "inter's-" along the way in its intentions. And so it is.

I live with relative ease in a world symbolized by Chambers with the word Prozac. Would we know anything of the enlightenment of Buddhism had the Buddha taken Prozac? On one level that question sounds silly—"What Would Jesus Do?" and all that. (Would Jesus drink unblended Scotch, enjoy hip-hop, represent the ACLU or the Christian Coalition? Would he go to a psychiatrist?) What Chambers does pose on his horizon is a range of issues having to do with creativity and brain processes, with what our Japanese friend of that week long ago would call "therapy and nontherapy conjoined."

Just about the time one begins to begin to get a handle on "consciousness," along come writings like those condensed by Gay Watson. How should a Westerner find a way into and through the disturbing signpost-less territory where Buddhism challenges Western science? Can one, dare one, avoid the encounters to which she invites readers, and still do justice to the mission of understanding?

Stephen Post does not take us out of the West, but on his horizon conventional ways of looking at soul and non-soul, faith and nonfaith, body versus mind and soul and spirit, encounter readers and, let us hope, elicit some reconsiderations.

Carol Rausch Albright's horizon is on the scene where a possible "God module" works in the brain. The module can lead some to think religion is nothing but a physical reaction, or it can promote new understanding of bodily experience in relation to religion. Reconsiderations lead different people in opposite directions.

Perhaps at the end of an issue like this and, more, after intense seminars or book-length experiences of the "other" we might welcome a wall instead of a horizon; a chance to settle back with the familiar instead of that which encounters us afresh; dogmatic affirmation of what we have long considered. But the adventure, typified by articles like those in the present package, offers perhaps better ways to serve, and to be.