Online forum helps Asian Americans find their way in Americanized Buddhism
Young Buddhist Editorial gives millennial and Gen Z Asian Americans a place to engage with their religion, culture and identity on their own terms. Young Buddhist Editorial members participate in a recent virtual meeting. Video screengrab
January 27, 2021
(RNS) Devon Matsumoto’s grandfather helped build the Mountain View Buddhist Temple in the San Francisco Bay Area after World War II. His father was later in charge of the campus buildings while his mother served as superintendent of the dharma school. Some months when he was growing up, Devon, now a 23-year-old social worker, would be there every day for Buddhist services and festivals or playing basketball with his friends.
Jan 22, 2021
The books we love coming out this week include new titles from Ben Hopkins, David W. Brown, and Jeff Wheeler.
John Ghazvinian. Knopf, $38.95 (688p) ISBN 978-0-307-27181-5
The hostility between the U.S. and Iran is a tragic lapse from a once-friendly relationship, according to this sweeping study. Historian Ghazvinian (coeditor,
American and Muslim Worlds Before 1900) surveys American-Iranian relations back to colonial Americans’ support for Persia in conflicts with the Turks and Tehran’s perennial desire for closer ties to the U.S. as a counterweight against British and Russian domination in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Iranians’ pro-American outlook soured, he contends, when the C.I.A. orchestrated the 1953 coup against liberal nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and then lavished arms on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s unpopular dictatorship. After the Shah’s overthrow in 1979, Iranian rage and American cluelessness precipitated the U.S