At Religion Dispatches, Arri Eisen writes about his experience creating and teaching a science course, requested by the Dalai Lama and intended to educate Buddhist monks and nuns:
If you’re like many of my administrators and colleagues, you might be asking, “What?! Beyond the coolness factor, what in the world is the point of teaching science to a bunch of monks halfway around the world?”
Can you say ‘globalization,’ ‘religion,’ ‘science and technology’?
Whether we like it or not, the world is becoming flatter by the day. This could be a disaster or, if we aggressively develop models to address the world’s complex problems—environmental degradation, racism, poverty—through profound cultural exchange and integration, this could be a boon. A vast majority of this globalizing world (including 100 million Americans) is deeply grounded in religious belief, and many of them have worldviews lacking any stark separation of spirituality from science.
How do we integrate, and not reject, belittle, or ignore religion and the religious, moving toward developing approaches and potential solutions to our most profound problems? And, finally then, as all of us our participants in this grand and inexorable globalization experiment, there is that most challenging and central question for all educators and learners: how do we most effectively teach and learn across cultural and intellectual gaps?
Read the full article here.