About

David Mason is Chair of Theatre and Director of Asian Studies at Rhodes College.  He is also the editor of Ecumenica.  He holds a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in South Asian Studies and Theatre Research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mason has studied râs lîlâ theatre as a Fulbright Fellow in Vrindavan, India.  He has published scholarly studies on subjects including classical Sanskrit aesthetics, Shakespeare in India, the Oberammergau Passion Play, and video game phenomenology.  He is the author of the books Theatre and Religion on Krishna’s Stage, Brigham Young: Sovereign in America, and My Mormonism.

Raised in Utah, Mason still affiliates himself with the LDS church, but his religion involves particle physics and Orthodox liturgy and cognitive theory and atheism and polytheism and bhakti and the Infant of Prague and apotheosis and absurdist theatre and everything else, besides, as a claim on “every item of truth, without limitation”.

This religion is a syncretic mess, perhaps, but Mason takes seriously the charge that used to be essential to LDS-Mormonism: to seek after all things lovely, of good report, and praiseworthy.

Because beauty is truth, after all.