Mateus Soares de Azevedo
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Mateus Soares de Azevedo is a Brazilian historian of religions and Islamologist. He has written and translated sixteen books on the Perennial Philosophy, and the mystical dimensions of Christianity and Islam. His latest books are A Inteligência da Fé: Cristianismo, Islã e Judaísmo" [The Intelligence of Faith: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism] (Rio de Janeiro, 2006) and Iniciación al Islam y al Sufismo (Barcelona, 2004).
He is the editor of the anthology "Ye Shall Know The Truth: Christianity And The Perennial Philosophy" (Bloomington, 2005). In that volume, he contributed the essay "Sages and Saints of Our Epoch in the light of the Perennial Philosophy", which discuss the common aspects between great contemplatives such as the Christians Padre Pio and Consolata Betrone, the Red-Indian medicine-man Black Elk, the Sufi Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, and the Hindu sage Shri Ramana Maharshi. He also co-edited a new collection of essays by the British Perennialist William Stoddart; entitled "Remembering in a World of Forgetting", the volume is scheduled to be published in 2007.
He was born in Belo Horizonte, province of Minas Gerais, central Brazil, in 24 January 1959. He holds a Masters degree in History of Religions from the University of São Paulo, with a thesis on the relevance of the perennial philosophy for contemporary thought. He studied journalism at the Catholic University, modern languages at the University of São Paulo, and comparative religion at the George Washington University.
He is also the author of more than fifty essays and articles dealing with the importance of traditional religion and spirituality in the contemporary world, some of them translated from the original Portuguese into English, French and Spanish.
He has contributed articles to journals and magazines in the USA: Sophia; Canada: Sacred Web; Spain: Sophia Perennis; France: Dossier H; Brazil: O Estado de Sao Paulo, Folha de S. Paulo, Gazeta Mercantil and Dialogo. He has also translated and published books by C.S. Lewis, Frithjof Schuon, William Stoddart, Martin Lings and Rama Coomaraswamy into Portuguese.
