Parabola's Winter 1982 issue: Holy War When we hear the word "war" today, it seems as though it could have no possible positive connotations. It brings up in us either fears of nuclear holocaust, or feelings of helplessness and fury about the waste of human life in Vietnam, in Northern Ireland, in the Middle East. "Holy wars" are perhaps the worst, meaning little more to us than a justification for atrocities, a sanction for fanaticism and brutality. Yet the holy men and the poets, the central myths and the great traditions do not shrink from war. They invoke it, urging us to battle. In our time, when the need for peace seems more desperate than ever before, the call for inner war, the injunction to carry on a struggle inside ourselves, rings true. We recognize that while we individually and collectively appear to wish for peace, we are nonetheless in conflict within and without. There seems to be no doubt that the unexamined and unresolved conflicts in us have a relationship to the chaos which we see so clearly about us. Renv© Daumal in this issue speaks of two wars--one which we simply undergo, which rages around and through us without our participation, and another which we perceive clearly and enter willingly. It is only when we are engaged in the inner warfare, he says, that we can be at peace with others. --from the editorial Focus Cover: Manjusri Boddhisatva Javanese, fourteenth century In this issue:

• "The Strife of the Spirit" by Adin Steinsaltz
  - Beyond peace of mind
• "Holy War" by Renv© Daumal - Drawing the lines of battle
• "The Spiritual Significance of Jihad" by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
  - The Islamic concept of inner and outer striving
• "The War for Peace" by Norris Merchant
  - The traditional expectation of redemption for mankind
• "The Lake" by Jonathan Cott
  - A poem
• "Leda's Lament" by P.L. Travers
  - Reflections on a life
• Arcs: "Fiery Light"
  - Fueling the vital spark
• "The Battle for Person in the Heart" by James and Myfanwy Moran
  - Spiritual warfare in Eastern Orthodox Christianity
• "Become What You Are: An interview with Brother David Steindl-Rast"
  - Principles of monastic life
• "War in Heaven" by Paul Jordan-Smith
  - The mythic roots of conflict

Tangents - Reviews

• "Kurosawa's Warriors" by Ruth McCormick
  - Film and the samurai code
• "Notes on the Cosmic Nanny" by Jonathan Cott
  - The latest adventures of Mary Poppins
• "The Vision of Gandhi" by Gautam Dasgupta
  - Philip Glass's Satyagraha

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "Beowulf" / British
• "Monkey" / Chinese
• "How Evil Began" / Lakota retold by Vivian One Feather