Three great opportunities are out there right now for the right person who happens to be in the right place at the right time: First is the U.S. Campaign for Burma, which is seeking a Communications and Development Coordinator. These folks are based in DC, so this is for those in that area or who are prepared to make a move. They also have an internship program, if you are or know a college student interested in first-hand experience with... Read more
The following is how I see, in 500 words or less, things as a Buddhist Seahawks fan. The Super Bowl this year is a good topic for the Buddhist who is a fan of either the Denver Broncos or the Seattle Seahawks. This is so because the two teams are populated by honorable and good men at all levels. I can say that the fan base for the Seattle Seahawks is happy the temperatures will be good in New Jersey... Read more
Growing up surrounded by “Indian Country” though remaining largely ignorant of issues facing Indian Americans for half of my life,* videos like this are close to my heart. Here is a video put out by a major group, the National Congress of American Indians, which helps illustrate some of the key issues that American Indians face today. The video is called “Proud to Be” and ends with the narrator saying, “Native Americans call themselves many things. The one thing they don’t…”... Read more
If you live in the United States, you know that “Super Bowl Sunday” is practically a religious holiday. It’s inescapable. As Buddhists, it’s easy to dismiss the American football championship game as “superficial” and “violent” but there is a place for sports in Buddhism. Modern sports developed out of the gladiator fights of the Roman Empire. The emperors used them to distract the public from government malfeasance, but the gladiator battles required the loser to be killed. Yikes! Thankfully, sports today... Read more
February 25, 1pm PST. Mark your calendars. I will be speaking with three amazing representatives of different religions, hosted by Mark W. Gura, on the topic of the future of religion. Here is the official blurb: An Interfaith Discussion About The Future Or Death Of Religion Hosted By Mark W. Gura With the turn of the new year and recent depictions of religion in the media, many are asking where religion is heading in 2014. The Rise of the Nones, the... Read more
The New York Times Magazine featured a story on Friday asking, Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl? I’m not so sure. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote after the championship games: I sat down and watched two football games yesterday for the first time in a couple of years. It was sort of like seeing your ex-wife for coffee. For 30 years of my life, Sunday afternoons in the Fall were the best time of the year. But given the NFL’s... Read more
I had the pleasure of meeting Ofosu (aka Born I and Born Infinite) at the 2012 UN Vesak conference, organized by Dr Dion Peoples (pictured below). His presentation, which included some free-style verse, was fantastic and I can only hope he continues to attend and present at conferences such as this. Describing his cross-genre electronic/hip hop/rap music, Born I says, “If I can bring different sounds together, I can bring different people together; if I can bring different people together,... Read more
This comes from Google News. Luckily, pressing the arrows brings along other outlets, some major, some smaller; all of whom have more interesting and informative coverage than CNN at the moment. Sigh. Read more
Yesterday Tanya over at Full Contact Enlightenment posted a great cartoon aimed at getting people in the cartoon community to speak up about issues around sexual harassment. As Tanya notes, this applies just as well to the Buddhist community (and, I imagine, to countless other communities out there). Last week we saw a small victory in terms of people saying and other people listening. Over at Connections, the author writes an “Open Letter to Noah Levine of Against the Stream” where... Read more
Buddhism as a philosophy often treads dangerously on two separate paths, the transcendent and the relational. Lose track of one and the other falters, inescapably. The transcendent is the goal, the path, and the suffering that leads us to it; the individual process of looking within, meditating, and coming to see both oneself and the world more clearly. The relational is the world itself, the stuff, just there; now here – the coffee that was outside me an hour ago... Read more
American Buddhist Perspectives
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