Buddhism

“Why is it that being a Buddhist Christian is often flagged as a problem,” asks theologian John Thatamanil, “but being a capitalist Christian is not?”

How could a Buddhist country have one of the worst human rights records in the world?

Stuck in the throes of a chaplain’s crisis, I leaned on the everlasting arms while consulting the ancient dharma.

Buddhist statues and Orthodox icons aren't always symmetrical. Neither are we.

The church of my youth taught me that salvation means having arrived. My Buddhist neighbors showed me otherwise.

Canadian pastor Brian Arthur Brown presents the sacred scriptures of four Eastern faith traditions alongside critical essays about the texts.

Japanese Buddhist adherence is in sharp decline. At every stage of this story, the analogies to Western Catholics are obvious.

"Buddhism has not just provided the flashlight with which I have discovered what was in the Christian basement. It has also added to that basement."

Western media treat Asian faiths quite generously in matters of religious conflict. Yet Christians on the ground in Asia face serious issues.

Anthony C. Yu died this spring. I am still discovering the profound influence this teacher had on me.

In August 1994, I was an introspective, brainy 16-year-old, fresh from a summer in Israel with a busload of other 16-year-olds. On my last morning in Jerusalem, I had watched the sun rise: cool breezes over ancient golden stones. I heard church bells ring and the Muslim call to prayer, whispering my own Hebrew dreams into fuzzy pink air. As a Jewish teen who went (reluctantly) to Israel for the Roman ruins but stayed for the prayers, when we chanted under desert stars I was suspended somewhere in between Reform Jewish teenagerhood and a future as a religious studies professor—plus my always evolving, complex relationship with Jewish adulthood.

This was when I first encountered Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India.