The Department of Inter-Religious Studies (DIRS) at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai was started about two decades ago, to foster religious studies as a complement to conventional academic education.
It did not take long to discover that all religious traditions are basically interconnected, and to be religious means to be inter-religious.

Then the shock of climate change awakened us to the reality beyond the human, and the DIRS took up the cause of the environment. Its perpetually calm-tempered and jolly Director, Father Prashant Olalekar (whom some of us lovingly call The Laughing Hippo), didn’t want to stop there, though. Empowered with the knowledge that the world we live in requires all of existence, whether that be man, animal, or tree, to be respected, he set out on his journey of inclusivity and has since taught us that we are not alone. We are connected to every leaf, every rock, even every star there is. Our actions have not just local or worldly, but cosmic consequences. 
And so our compassion, our love, must also be cosmic.
The DIRS, then, is not simply about religion, it’s about the entire universe. It’s about you, and it’s about everyone else too. It’s about listening, it’s about speaking out, and about belonging.

We have gone from being inter-religious to simply inter-being, with everyone and everything around us.

A Message From the Director: Exploring New Frontiers

‘At a time of increasing intolerance of the “Other” from the local to the global and even beyond, we believe that one of the best ways to respond is by getting people of all faiths together to work for a common cause that transcends boundaries of religion, nation, gender, etc. Hence, like last year, we have continued to explore new frontiers of collaboration and networking.

The universe is an interconnected whole. Whether we belong to any religion or not, we feel called to make our contribution to co-creating cosmic compassion. Compassion is at the core of all religions. This universal compassion takes us beyond narrow frontiers of family, religion, nation and world to embrace the whole cosmos.

We hope to foster a sense of our interconnection and interdependence by collaborating with people of all faiths, as well as those who do not publicly profess any faith, in all such new initiatives.’

– Prashant Olalekar , S.J.