Religion East & West highlights the annual Venerable Master Hsuan Hua Memorial Lectures, sponsored by the Institute for World Religions. The lecture series offers a forum to distinguished scholar-practitioners so that they may present important new ideas in the study of religion and human spirituality. Each year’s issue of Religion East & West begins with a transcript of the lecture given in that year, together with a response to the lecture by another distinguished scholar.

The 2005 Hsuan Hua Memorial Lecture was given by Huston Smith, the world-renowned author of The World’s Religions and Why Religion Matters. Lecturers in previous years were Michael Nagler, founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Non-Violent Future, 2004; Anthony Yu, professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and translator of The Journey to the West, 2003; Mary Evelyn Tucker, Professor of Religion at Bucknell University and editor of Buddhism and Ecology, Confucianism and Ecology, and Hinduism and Ecology, 2002; and Henry Rosemont Jr., now visiting professor at Brown University, and author of A Chinese Mirror and Rationality and Religious Experience, 2001.