This Week in “Things that are Totally Awesome…”

Get this: our friend and past interviewee Joshua Eaton will be teaching a class on “Buddhism and Social Justice” at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education this fall. The course description reads:

Join us to look at Buddhist ideas about social justice, both ancient and contemporary. Readings will come from poetry, philosophy, narratives, sermons, and lectures from across Buddhist Asia. You’ll gain a working knowledge of the history of ideas about political philosophy with the various Buddhist traditions, the context that shaped these ideas, and strategies for utilizing these ideas in our own world.

Way cool! Is that right in our strike zone, or what? If you’re in the Cambridge area, sign up!

Joshua is, of course, the editor, writer, and translator who founded the visionary Dana Wiki (www.danawiki.org) — an online resource meant to aid Buddhist Americans in community service work. A graduate of the Master of Divinity in Buddhist Studies program at the Harvard Divinity School, he also served as editor-in-chief of Cult/ure: The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School during his time at the institution. Today, among other things, he is a contributing scholar at the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue’s State of Formation. Joshua is also an active, must-follow Twitterer @joshua_eaton.

Joshua and I — motivated by recent news reports out of Burma and Thailand, as well as by the month of Ramadan — also recently collaborated on an open letter from Buddhist teachers and scholars and others on Islamophobia at http://buddhistletteronislamophobia.wordpress.com. He is the author of the letter — though a few of us offered little tweaks and edits — and I put together the website and am helping him get the word out and generate signatures. It’s a cause I believe strongly in and to which he gave great voice. We hope you’ll sign it!