José Eduardo Franco e Porfírio Pinto - Dicionário Global das Heresias

The history of heresies is fascinating in many respects. The kaleidoscopic universe of their emergence, diversification, evolution, and metamorphosis is fundamental to understanding the history of thought in its long duration and in its processes of reception, metamorphosis, and appropriation. […] HERESIES WERE TRUE LABORATORIES OF NEW IDEAS, OF DIVERSE MODELS OF RELIGIOUS STRUCTURING AND EXPERIENCE, OF SOCIAL PRACTICES AND BEHAVIORS DIVERGENT FROM THE ESTABLISHED STATUS QUO. Indeed, the concept of heresy refers to the semantic field of choices of possible paths, of the options at stake.» [From the Introduction]

«This dictionary should be read as a book.» First: each heresy (or one recognized as such by a heresiarch or, perhaps, by a heresiologist) can present within itself such completeness [...] that it opens up a dizzying plurality of possible religions with their creed, their dogmatism, their apologetics, their high priests, their priests, their novices, their temples, their rites.

Then: moving from one heresy to another within the same religious system, one would discover in that system the continuities, the genealogies, the transfers from one doctrinal body to another, and from one era to another. Finally: the infinite variety of situations in which a religious dissent, or even solely a spiritual or mystical dissonance declared guilty of heresy, should provide the weapons for a relentless resistance against any secular religion, present or future – especially future – when the impasses of radical individualism (and, perhaps, the disappointments of atheism as philosophical individualism) will have opened the doors to new communicators and excommunicators. This global Dictionary of Heresies is, certainly, in a global world, a book of the future. »[From the Postscript by Pierre-Antoine Fabre, EHESS]