Raimon Panikkar Alemany, also known as Raimundo Panikkar and Raymond Panikkar (November 2, 1918 – August 26, 2010), was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest and a proponent of Interfaith dialogue. As a scholar, he specialized in comparative religion. Early life and education Raimon Panikkar was born to a Spanish Roman Catholic mother and a Hindu Indian father in Barcelona. His mother was well-educated and from the Catalan bourgeoisie. His father, Ramunni Panikkar, belonged to a Malabar Nair family from South India. Panikkar's father was a freedom fighter during British colonial rule in India, who later escaped from Britain and married into a Catalan family. Panikkar's father studied in England and was the representative of a German chemical company in Barcelona. Educated at a Jesuit school, Panikkar studied chemistry and philosophy at the universities of Barcelona, Bonn and Madrid, and Catholic theology in Madrid and Rome. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Madrid in 1946 and a doctorate in chemistry in 1958. He earned a third doctorate in theology at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome in 1961, in which he compared St. Thomas Aquinas's philosophy with the 8th-century Hindu philosopher Ādi Śańkara's interpretation of the Brahma Sutras. Career In 1946 he was ordained a Catholic priest and became a professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid. He made his first trip to India in 1954 where he studied Indian philosophy and religion at the University of Mysore and Banaras Hindu University, where he met several Western monks seeking Eastern forms for the expression of their Christian beliefs. "I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian", he later wrote. While in Jerusalem during 1962, he was summoned to Rome by the Opus Dei founder and director, Josemaría Escrivá, who expelled him after a brief trial where he was charged with disobedience to the organization. In 1966 he became a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School and a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972, and for many years he taught in the spring and spent the rest of the year doing research in India. Where the typical approach to cross-cultural religious studies, especially in a secular university, was to hold two or more traditions at arm's length and draw lines of comparison