Deep Encounters: Steps toward Dissolving the 21st Century Mystery and Discovering the Truly Global Learner

Excerpted from the preface:

In this great river of life that flows endlessly, there were moments of deep feeling when I realized that my life is a gift. Each such moment resembles an eternal spring gushing forth with the joy of "being helped to live and helping others to live." We can live as recipients of life from all others and all else. Striving to live with all, I present this book as a kind of landscape of encounters…a portrayal of thoughts and experiences that call on privileged instants in the process, instants by which I have been coming to encounter myself.

Eiji Hattori studied philosophy at Kyoto University and the Sorbonne before a career at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. Hattori organized two large symposia with UNESCO on "cultural diversity and transversal values" in Paris and Tokyo. He participated in Japanese-Islamic dialogues in Tehran (2005), Tokyo (2007), and Riyadh (2008). Gray translated and edited his book Letters from the Silk Roads (University Press of America, 2000). Deep Encounters is the offspring of that successful collaboration.
Wallace Gray, Ph.D., a philosopher and comparativist, has lived and taught in Japan. He has published translations of correspondence with ordinary Japanese citizens, dialogues involving his graduate school professor, Nels Ferré, as well as contemporaries such as Billy Graham and Paul Tillich, and contributions to John C. Plott's Global History of Philosophy series. Gray has done considerable research on Toyohiko Kagawa and the "new religion" Oomoto.