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A groundbreaking study of prison religion, Karma and Punishment introduces a form of chaplaincy rooted in the Buddhist concept of doctrinal admonition. Through research and fieldwork, Adam Lyons uncovers a dimension of Buddhist modernism that developed as Japan's religious organizations carved out a niche as defenders of society by fighting crime.
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History is not one story, but many. In Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, M. William Steele takes a new look at the people, places, and events associated with Japan’s engagement with modernity, starting with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853. In many cases, this new look derives from visual sources, such as popular broadsheets, satirical cartoons, ukiyo-e and other woodblock prints, postcards, and photographs. The book illustrates the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of people who experienced the unfolding of modern Japan. It focuses both on the experiences of people living the events “at that time” and on the reflections of others looking back. ...
The essays collected in this volume for the first time foreground the fundamental role Asian actors played in the formation of scholarly knowledge on Buddhism and the emergence of Buddhist studies as an academic discipline in Europe and Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The contributions focus on different aspects of the interchange between Japanese Buddhists and their European interlocutors ranging from the halls of Oxford to the temples of Nara. They break the mould of previous scholarship and redress the imbalances inherent in Eurocentric accounts of the construction of Buddhism as an object of professorial interest. Contributors are: Micah Auerback, Mick Deneckere, Stephan Kigensan Licha, Hans Martin Krämer, Ōmi Toshihiro, Jakub Zamorski, Suzanne Marchand, Martin Baumann, Catherine Fhima, and Roland Lardinois.
Cornerstone of the Nation is the first historical account of the complex alliance of military and civilian forces that catapulted South Korea’s conjoined militarization and industrialization under Park Chung Hee (1961–1979). Kwon reveals how Park’s secret program to build an independent defense industry spurred a total mobilization of business, science, labor, and citizenry, all of which converged in military-civilian forces that propelled an unprecedented model of modernization in Korea. Drawing on largely untapped declassified materials from Korea and personal interviews with contemporaneous participants in the nascent defense industry, as well as declassified US documents and other ...
Of all the world's major religions, Chinese Buddhism has probably experienced the most traumatic modernization. Less than forty years have separated the self-contained Manchu Empire from the establishment of a Communist state. The consequences are described in this book. Holmes Welch offers the first detailed account of the careers of recent Buddhist leaders and of the diverse organization they started. Eighteen Chinese Buddhist associations are identified as the author traces the struggle for national leadership. The role of T'ai-hsii, the leader best known to Western readers but not, it is shown, among Buddhists, is given a controversial reassessment. After examining the main features of the revival, Welch puts them into a larger political framework. In the process, he offers copious evidence that our picture of Chinese Buddhism has been distorted. What has been termed a "revival" was actually a secular reorientation. The author's conclusion is that this secularization, vigorous as it was, in reality foreshadowed the decline of Chinese Buddhism as a living religion.
A full, contextual study of Irenaeus of Lyons, the first great theologian of the Christian tradition. John Behr sets Irenaeus both within his own context of the second century and our own contemporary context.
Immigrant Japan? Sounds like a contradiction, but as Gracia Liu-Farrer shows, millions of immigrants make their lives in Japan, dealing with the tensions between belonging and not belonging in this ethno-nationalist country. Why do people want to come to Japan? Where do immigrants with various resources and demographic profiles fit in the economic landscape? How do immigrants narrate belonging in an environment where they are "other" at a time when mobility is increasingly easy and belonging increasingly complex? Gracia Liu-Farrer illuminates the lives of these immigrants by bringing in sociological, geographical, and psychological theories—guiding the reader through life trajectories of migrants of diverse backgrounds while also going so far as to suggest that Japan is already an immigrant country.