The prolific Spanish-Indian mystical theologian Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010) continues to attract scholarly attention—as indicated by this volume written by a somewhat global spread of contributors, some of whom knew Panikkar in person. A reader quickly senses why the authors often characterize Panikkar's thought as highly complex; in the foreword Rowan Williams describes it as “exceptional in its depth and subtlety,” with “often idiosyncratic and dense vocabulary” and even “infuriating for some theologians” (xv–xvii). The contents are assembled in two sections.

Part 1 offers a description and analysis of “The Many Faces of Raimon Panikkar” and will be the more interesting for a general reader. It provides several brief accounts of the main features of his life (each somewhat different in tone and content), and its five chapters introduce a number of the recurring themes that are important for an understanding of Panikkar—for example the “cosmotheandrism” and “Christophany” (to mention two of his many neologisms) that became centrally important to him. One feature often mentioned is the importance of Panikkar as, above all, a mystical thinker. According to Milena Carrara Pavan in her “Raimon Panikkar: Life and Work,” he was “more than anything a mystic who concealed his spirituality under an intellectual mantle” (4); it remains “an indispensable hermeneutical key to all his intellectual work” (14)—a dimension further elaborated in a chapter by Young-chan Ro. Another theme that receives repeated attention is Panikkar's complex understanding of and relationship with theism, Christianity as a whole (though “Christianness” was his preferred term), and Catholicism. Williams believes that one way of reading Panikkar is “as someone who takes the central affirmations of classical Christian doctrine more seriously than most” (xvi). Other contributors are far less certain, and four of them (Joseph Prabhu, Erik Ranstrom, Jyri Komulainen, and Anselm Min) each carefully—and not without a degree of admiration and appreciation for Panikkar's stimulating creativity—chart his journey into what might be called a post-Christian position. One of the many virtues of a chapter by Erik Ranstrom is his account of Panikkar's early religious formation. Ranstrom—along with Min and Francis Clooney—are the least hesitant of the contributors in offering a partial deconstruction of the rather romanticized portrait presented by some other contributors.

Although Part 2 is entitled “Foundational Themes: Philosophical and Theological,” some of its material (for example on anthropology, gender and sexuality, social justice, and eschatology) is rather specialized. As expected in an academic text, individual writers make assorted points related to their own interests—perhaps at times rather remote from the worlds actually inhabited by Panikkar. Even if several chapters are devoid of any appropriate critique, other authors signal concerns. Komulainen draws attention to the decidedly partial attention paid by Panikkar to some religious traditions: “One cannot escape the impression that there is a steady undercurrent of suspicion against Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage in Panikkar's thinking” that appears as his cosmotheandrism develops (90). Min draws a strong contrast between Panikkar's “cosmotheandric vision” and Christian theology. Such concerns might not have troubled Panikkar or his champions both within the volume and beyond, but a more basic reason for the misgivings is outlined by Francis Clooney in his epilogue (“After Panikkar”), where he speaks of Panikkar both as “a genius” but also as “something of a cosmic loner, and not always to his benefit or ours” (263). What Clooney means is the way in which Panikkar, for all his formidable width of learning, seems not to know or to ignore Catholic (and Protestant) and other scholarly—including Hindu—attempts to grapple quite differently with the same issues that preoccupied him; Clooney outlines and discusses the problem in some detail (262–67). Such problems might also help explain the near-total eclipse of Panikkarian influence in contemporary India. Panikkar's long-standing relationship and eventual (brief) marriage to his housekeeper, Maria, receives only the briefest mention by the editors as merely “canonically anomalous in the Roman Catholic Church” (xx) and is not mentioned either in a chapter by Roberta Cappellini on “Sexuality and Gender in the Vision of Raimon Panikkar” or in the chapter on his “Life and Work” written by Pavan and “based on my first-hand knowledge of him, his biographical notes … as well as his diaries” (1). Despite Pavan's controlling hand in the editing and publication of Panikkar's Opera Omnia (helpfully outlined: 13–18), neither she nor other contributors discuss the way in which access to archival and other factual material about issues related to Panikkar is severely restricted by the Fundaciό Vivarium Raimon Panikkar, of which Pavan is president. The volume concludes with a helpful “Glossary of [some 37] Panikkarian Terms,” a representative but necessarily partial primary bibliography of some 140 or so key books and articles written by Panikkar, together with about 190 items in a secondary bibliography and a dense but comprehensive index.