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Winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion A Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Raises timely and important questions about what religious freedom in America truly means.” —Ruth Ozeki “A must-read for anyone interested in the implacable quest for civil liberties, social and racial justice, religious freedom, and American belonging.” —George Takei On December 7, 1941, as the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the first person detained was the leader of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist sect in Hawai‘i. Nearly all Japanese Americans were subject to accusations of disloyalty, but Buddhists aroused particular suspicion. From the White House to the local town council, many believed that Buddhism was...
"Popular understanding of Zen Buddhism typically involves a stereotyped image of isolated individuals in meditation, contemplating nothingness. This book presents the "other side of Zen," by examining the movement's explosive growth during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867) in Japan and by shedding light on the broader Japanese religious landscape during the era. Using newly-discovered manuscripts, Duncan Ryuken Williams argues that the success of Soto Zen was due neither to what is most often associated with the sect, Zen meditation, nor to the teachings of its medieval founder, Dogen, but rather to the social benefits it conveyed." "Williams's work is based on careful examination of archival sources including temple logbooks, prayer and funerary manuals, death registries, miracle tales of popular Buddhist deities, secret initiation papers, villagers' diaries, and fundraising donor lists."--Jacket.
Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures consists of about 25 essays dealing with the environmental knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Indian, Thai, and Andean views of nature and the environment, among others, the book includes essays on Environmentalism and Images of the Other, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Worldviews and Ecology, Rethinking the Western/non-Western Divide, and Landscape, Nature, and Culture. The essays address the connections between nature and culture and relate the environmental practices to the cultures which produced them. Each essay contains an extensive bibliography. Because the geographic range is global, the book fills a gap in both environmental history and in cultural studies. It should find a place on the bookshelves of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars, as well as in libraries serving those groups.
The United States has long been described as a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation of religions in which Muslims and Methodists, Buddhists and Baptists live and work side by side. This book explores that nation of religions, focusing on how four recently arrived religious communities--Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs--are shaping and, in turn, shaped by American values. For a generation, scholars have been documenting how the landmark legislation that loosened immigration restrictions in 1965 catalyzed the development of the United States as "a nation of Buddhists, Confucianists, and Taoists, as well as Christians," as Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark put it. The contributors t...
Buddhism has become a major religion in Canada over the last half-century. The 'ethnic Buddhism' associated with immigrant Asian people is the most important aspect, but there is also a growing constituency of Euro-Canadian Buddhists seriously interested in the faith. This insightful study analyzes the phenomenon of Buddhism in Canada from a regional perspective. The work provides an important examination of the place of Buddhism in a developed western country associated with a traditional Judeo-Christian culture, but undergoing profound sociological transformation due to large-scale immigration and religio-cultural pluralism. It is a valuable text for students of religion, Buddhism and North American Studies.
Adualism between man and nature has been a persistent feature of Western thought and spirituality from ancient times to the present. The opposition of mind and body, consciousness and world has tended to obscure the ways in which humans are ecologically part of interconnected systems, some of which are obvious while others operate in hidden but life-sustaining ways. Cultural Landscapes explores the physical ways in which we are intimately linked to the land and the intellectual and aesthetic connections human consciousness has with the landscape. Following the editor's introductory essay, the lead article by Jame Schaeffer, "Quest for the Common Good: A Collaborative Public Theology for a Li...
Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration accompanies the Japanese American National Museum's 2022 "Sutra and Bible" exhibition. Together, the exhibit and catalogue explore the role that religious teachings, practices, and communities played while Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. From the confines of concentration camps and locales under martial law to the battlegrounds of Europe, Japanese Americans drew on their faith to survive forced removal, indefinite incarceration, unjust deportation, family separation, military service, and resettlement at a time when their race and religion were seen as threats to national security. Co-edited by Dr. Emily Anderson and Dr. Duncan Ry?ken Williams, this catalogue weaves visual storytelling with auxiliary essays from thirty-two prominent voices across academic, arts, and social justice communities.
With an innovative approach to the subject, this work gives a logical and thorough examination of the metaphysical and ethical dimensions of early Buddhist literature.
In Mystics, William Harmless, S.J., introduces readers to the scholarly study of mysticism. He explores both mystics' extraordinary lives and their no-less-extraordinary writings using a unique case-study method centered on detailed examinations of six major Christian mystics: Thomas Merton, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, and Evagrius Ponticus. Rather than presenting mysticism as a subtle web of psychological or theological abstractions, Harless's case-study approach brings things down to earth, restoring mystics to their historical context.