A lawyer friend explained it to me this way: Since the 1980s, lawyers with specialized expertise and exclusive relationships—especially those…
Karmic historiography
Buddhism
Virūpa, meet Fichte: Uncanny resonances in comparative philosophy
Comparative approaches, especially those couched as “East/West” philosophy, are beset with simplification, projections, and biases, often resulting in narrowness and…
Asian American religions: Transforming our religious ecology
Jumping across time and space and traversing religious practices, the essays in this forum present glimpses into the diversity and…
Asian American Buddhists: To heathenry and beyond
As a demographic that continues to be marked with the scarlet letter of heathenry, Asian American Buddhists demonstrate the nuanced…
The corporate nature of “alternative” practices
Ioannis Gaitanidis and Aike P. Rots, scholars of contemporary Asian religion, discuss commercial spirituality and corporate myth-making with examples from…
Overlooking official responses: Thai Buddhist institutions and Covid-19
It is striking to me that most of the discussions of Buddhist responses to Covid particularly in Southeast Asia .…
Circulating publicness and public circulation
How is publicness—the realization of publicity—itself mediated, circulated, and received?
Silencing the monks
Elections do many things, but one thing they are supposed to do is make a people’s opinion known. One group…
Conviction and humility in American Buddhist activism
Despite this image of Buddhists as quiet and humble, inward-looking rather than outward-focused, there is a long tradition of American…
Competing inequalities
Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report is a luminous, fiercely argued book. It requires deep and…