“It’s just a visceral feeling, like a punch to the stomach," said a local community member, about the vandalism. Forty leaders of various faiths signed an open letter this week condemning the vandalism of a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Tacoma, Washington and disavowing the motivations behind it. “This incident occurs amidst rising national tides of [...]
How Will I Explain Extremist Buddhism to My Children?
Khin Mai Aung once worried her children would pick up dogmatic views from her husband’s Catholic faith. Now, she struggles to explain to them the terrible violence in her country of birth — incited by members of her own faith. I’m Buddhist. My husband is Catholic. Our religious differences created some tension early in our marriage — mostly because I fretted about our [...]
Yes, Buddhism is a Religion
Buddhism shouldn’t be stereotyped as a New Age fad or reduced to a mere technique, says Scott Mitchell. We miss so much by not acknowledging what it really is. In the American imagination, Buddhism has long been associated with counterculture drop-outs—Beat generation iconoclasts, Age of Aquarius hippies, woo-woo New Agers. This unfortunate stereotype identifies Western [...]
Are You Spiritual But Not Religious? 10 Reasons Why Buddhism Will Enrich Your Path
The number one reason is: "No God." Number ten is: "It Works." Melvin McLeod on what Buddhism can offer your spiritual path. It wasn’t so long ago that most Americans took their religion for granted. You were born into a religion, you lived in it, and you died in it. Except for a few daring freethinkers, that’s the way it was as recently as the 1950s, and that’s still the [...]
Huston Smith’s Fifty Years on the Razor’s Edge
In his 2009 profile, Barry Boyce visits Huston Smith, the renowned spiritual explorer who brought an insider’s knowledge of the world’s religions to a narrow-minded West and defined comparative religion as we know it today. There was nothing comparative about religion in 1950s America. Your religion was right. Others were wrong. The familiar religions were a [...]
Watch the heartwarming “Love Has No Labels” — the first PSA to win an Emmy
We first shared this beautiful PSA in March of 2015. Now, it's the first PSA to win an Emmy Award. "Love Has No Labels," made by the Ad Council as part of a year-long campaign about implicit bias, reminds us about love's power to cross any and all perceived boundaries. "Most of us aren’t even conscious of our prejudice," the campaign's website explains. "That’s why [...]
Is Buddhism a Religion?
Amitabha (Amida), contained within a closed shrine. Photo courtesy of Free Sackler. Is it a religion, psychology, or way of life? The “religion without God” has baffled Western thinkers for hundreds of years. Our three experts, Charles Prebish ("Yes”), Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche ("No”), and Joan Sutherland ("Kind of”), join the debate. Yes, Buddhism is a religion A religion [...]
British cathedral fosters allegedly controversial Buddhist-Christian friendship
This week, The Telegraph reported that York Minster — the church that is the seat of the second-highest office in the Church of England, the Archishop of York — has been hosting Zen classes for the last two years. Some say the classes are controversial. The church's Canon Chancellor, Christopher Collingwood, has an enthusiasm for Zen Buddhism. The classes began after he [...]
George Saunders shares the Buddhist influence that informed his now-famous meditation on kindness and regret
George Saunders's 2013 address about kindness to Syracuse University’s graduating class rang so universally true that it went viral, and then became a book. The roots of the speech are not as famous, but Saunders -- a Buddhist, with a new novel called Lincoln in the Bardo forthcoming -- has said, as Syracuse.com reports, "the lessons from his speech reflect the teachings of [...]
Study finds Buddhism is the least homonegative religion
A new study in the Journal of Homosexuality has shown that, of all the world’s religions, Buddhism is the least homonegative. “Homonegativity” is defined as “an aversion to homosexuality as a social practice or way of life.” The study looked at 79 countries to determine how religion and religiosity affect attitudes to homosexuality. Results indicated that, while religious [...]
