Buddhism

Melinda Haselton (Haley)

With a background studying Buddhist stupas in rural Nepal, Melinda Haley's research focused on the role of the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya at Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. Haley's research in Nepal concluded that the stupa is a physical object used to access spiritual power and in turn create both a Buddhist landscape and community. Her summer research, undertaken while a student at Drew University, focused on the presence of the Stupa in the community's worship, practice and everyday life. Her findings concluded that the Stupa is an integral part of the Center and that it bears significant impact on the center's development. Haley's research also reveals that the stupa provides as exquisite space for practitioners, bonding the larger American Buddhist community. Additionally, she concluded that the stupa is an important aspect of the evolving American Buddhism, as it serves as an authentic example of Tibetan Buddhist architecture.... Read more about Melinda Haselton (Haley)
Drew University
Madison, NJ

Erin Ehmen

 

Erin Ehmen was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when she researched the Buddhist centers of the Madison, Wisconsin area. Ehmen profiled diverse centers from a variety of Buddhist traditions. She also produced two longer papers on the Deer Park Buddhist Center and the Cambodian Buddhist Society of Wisconsin. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

... Read more about Erin Ehmen

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI

Dr. Susan Sered

The Religion, Health, and Healing Initiative (RHHI), under the direction of Dr. Susan Sered, was established in September 2000 in order to further cross-cultural studies of the intersections of healing and religion. The impetus for the initiative was the desire to turn rigorous intellectual attention to the many ways in which religious practices, beliefs, and institutions construct, and are constructed by, experiences of illness, health, and healing cross-culturally.

While the RHHI has run its course, other programs dedicated to the study of religion and healing continue exploring this rich aspect of contemporary culture. The Boston Healing Landscape Project, under the direction of Linda Barnes, is an important source of information on religion and healing in Boston, especially in African Diaspora communities.

During its four-year course, the Religion, Health and Healing Initiative generated several bodies of work.

Religious Healing in Boston: A series of essays exploring ways in which diverse Boston communities draw on religious and spiritual practices and ideas in response to illness and suffering. Highlighting a variety of Boston areas communities, the essays offer windows into the many ways in which members of our society draw upon religious and spiritual resources at times of illness and suffering. The papers originally appeared in three publications edited by Susan Sered and produced by the Center for the Study of World Religions.... Read more about Susan Sered

ssered@suffolk.edu
Suffolk University
Boston, MA

The Ackland Art Museum

In fall 1997, the Ackland Art Museum of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) began focusing resources on using its multicultural...

Read more about The Ackland Art Museum
Ackland Art Museum
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
101 S Columbia St, Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Kris Snibbe

Kris Snibbe photographed Buddhism in China and Tibet in 1997. As an affiliate of the Pluralism Project, he documented Cambodian, Vietnamese, and other...

Read more about Kris Snibbe
http://krissnibbe.com
Photographer
Arlington, MA

Dr. Duncan Williams

Dr. Duncan Williams is associate professor of religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. He serves as the director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. Dr. Williams previously served as assistant professor of Buddhism at the University of California-Irvine from 2002-2006 and became an affiliate of the Pluralism Project during that time, organizing several projects that explored Buddhism in America.  Prior to that, he did research for the Pluralism Project on Buddhism in the Pacific Northwest during his time as a graduate student at Harvard University.

Project 1: Southern California Regional Researchers Network

A three-day (September 3-5, 2004) Issei Buddhism Conference conference drew 30 of the most distinguished researchers from Japan, the U.S., Canada, and Brazil to University of California, Irvine to explore the Japanese immigration experience in those countries and the role of Buddhist temples in those communities. The vast majority of the "Issei," or the first generation Japanese immigrants, were active in the establishment and growth of Buddhist temples in Hawaii, the West Coast of Canada and the U.S., and Latin and South America. The Buddhist temple served not only as a spiritual refuge for these pioneers, but as a cultural center where Japanese language and cultural traditions (tea ceremony, flower arrangement, martial arts, taiko drumming, among others) were transmitted from the first generation to their Nisei children born in the Americas.

In this groundbreaking conference, senior and younger scholars based on both sides of the Pacific Rim presented keynote addresses and papers in roundtable panels on seven sects of Japanese American Buddhism, the role of Buddhist women's auxiliaries, and Buddhist life on the plantations of Hawaii, Buddhism in the internment camps of World War II, among other topics. As a growing field of research, as evidenced by the explosion of new monographs by a number of the participants, this conference is the culmination of smaller-scale panels at national conferences in religion. Asian Studies, and Asian American Studies, but also the beginning of a new dialogue on an international level. With the problem of language barriers in the past, it has been especially difficult for Japanese scholars to communicate their high-level research to their counterparts in the Americas. This international conference was the first to bridge this gap.

Project 2: Orange County Mapping at U-California, Irvine

During the 2003-2004 academic year, students from the Buddhism course (EA20) and Japanese American Religious History Course (HU31) were involved in mapping Buddhism in Orange County. Based on the basic profiling of 2003-2004, the 2004-2005 project focus was to engage in more detailed and in-depth surveys in conjunction with a UCI university-wide initiative for the mapping project (joint project of the Departments of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Asian American Studies and the Religious Studies Program).

Project 3: Minority Religions in Wartime Project

In trying to understand the post-9/11 targeting and harassment of Muslim-Americans, Arab-Americans, and those who look like those who were responsible for the terrorist attacks (such as Sikhs and other South Asians), it is instructive to examine parallels with the experience of Japanese-American Buddhists after Pearl Harbor and during World War II. A recent study of FIB documents, declassified through the Freedom of Information Act by Duncan Williams (UC-Irvine), has shown that nearly 300 priests were picked up by the FBI after Pearl Harbor. They were targetted based on unfounded claims such as that Buddhists bells were going to be used to send Morse code messages to the Japanese Navy or that temples were the sites of spy meetings between German and Japanese "fifth column" units.

The "Minority Religions in Wartime Project" is intended to examine the parallels and differences between government attitudes and treatments of Buddhists (during WW2) and Muslims (post 9/11) as the post 9/11 period has also seen its share of indiscriminate arrests of thousands of young Muslim "enemy aliens" and targeting of Muslim charitable organizations accused of terrorist links. It was in the crucible of war that many Japanese-Americans took on the conflicted identity of being Japanese-American-Buddhist. The project examined if 9/11 will also turn out to be just as significant a turning point for Muslim-Americans as they struggle with Americanization and resistance to it in their ethnic and religious identity formation.

... Read more about Duncan Williams

University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA

Dr. David W. Odell-Scott and Dr. Surinder M. Bhardwaj

Dr. David Odell-Scott and Dr. Surinder Bhardwaj became Pluralism Project affiliates in 1999. Together, Drs. Odell-Scott and Bhardwaj engaged their students in a study of immigrant religious communities in northern Ohio.  Dr. David Odell-Scott is an associate dean at Kent State University and directs the College of Arts and Science's Center for Comparative and Integrated Programs. Dr. Surinder Bhardwaj is professor emeritus in the geography department at Kent State University. Upon Dr. Bhardwaj's retirement, Dr. Odell-Scott was joined in 2013 by Rev. Lauren M. Odell-Scott in the continuation of this project.

... Read more about David W. Odell-Scott and Dr. Surinder M. Bhardwaj

Kent State University
Kent, OH

Dr. Paul Numrich

Dr. Paul Numrich is Professor in the Snowden Chair for the Study of Religion and Interreligious Relations at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. He became a Pluralism Project affiliate in 1998 while a research assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His first affiliate research project (1998-2001) focused on the landscape of Buddhism in Chicago; the second (2010) was on mosques in the same city.

... Read more about Paul Numrich

Methodist Theological School in Ohio
Delaware, OH

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