The subject of mysticism has reentered contemporary discourse through a number of channels—the re-discovery of the poetry of such luminaries as the incomparable Suf poet Jelaluddin Rumi, the North Indian troubadour Kabir, and the outpourings of the saints of the bhakti tradition, through new thinking about the role of art, dance, performance, and perhaps surprisingly, sport, and the reentry of “fantasy” into literature in a major way (the “Narnia” stories of C. S. Lewis being a case in point, and certainly the “Harry Potter” phenomenon). This trend has been reinforced through comparative religion, through the profound re-discovery of nature as a result of our growing ecological crisis, and through the widespread perception that conventional political, economic, and social policies and approaches do not touch the deep levels of human existence, but may in fact contribute to the alienation from nature and from one another so symptomatic of our planetary crisis. Interest in mysticism is not then purely scholarly: it increasingly manifests itself as what we might call “practical mysticism”—hence its immediate connection to pragmatism in its various forms.