Sand Walk: An Interreligious Encounter with Aboriginal Lifeways is an edited multifaith volume that grows out of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion's inaugural Nasr Book Prize for Religion and the World, awarded to Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. In conversation with Sand Talk, the book gathers essays from a 2022 multifaith symposium and retreat convened at the University of Notre Dame and in Shipshewana, Indiana, where scholars and practitioners from Indigenous, Zoroastrian, Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Catholic, Muslim, Sikh, Bahá'í, and secular perspectives explored what it might mean to imagine "the world as it should be" through interreligious engagement.
Edited by Mahan Mirza, with a foreword by Anantanand Rambachan and responses by Yunkaporta to each chapter, the volume probes the possibilities and limits of academic theory, asking whether human experience can be abstracted, quantified, and universalized without losing the relational, embodied, and place based character that Indigenous lifeways insist upon. Contributors engage key themes from Sand Talk-such as relationality, high context knowledge, time, power, and humility-through their own traditions, while Yunkaporta replies to each essay by centering a particular logical fallacy, creating a dialogical structure that both honors and unsettles familiar modes of reasoning.
The book emerges from a deliberately deep process: a three day retreat in which participants broke bread, visited cultural sites, and built relationships before the public symposium, resisting the transactional feel of one off academic events. Mirza's introduction frames the volume as a multifaith conversation that is at once vulnerable and intellectually rigorous, insisting that the subjective, humorous, and personal dimensions of encounter are integral to its theoretical insight rather than distractions from it. As an Interreligious Studies Press publication, Sand Walk offers a rich resource for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in Indigenous thought, interreligious studies, global ethics, and the role of religious and philosophical traditions in reimagining the world amid ecological and cultural crisis.
