Department of Religion
Many Chinese texts written between 250 BCE and 800 CE preserve passages prescribing methods for preventing a particular sort of dream from occurring or for addressing its effects after it had occurred.
This talk explores the terrain of happiness in these two traditions, showing shared concerns and sharpening differences, and offers some methodological reflection about the study of emotions in this context.
This lecture will appeal to specialists of East Asian religions and to religionists and anthropologists interested in ritual.
The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol drew attention to a number of extremist movements including the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The Yogic Practice School (Yogācāra) is one of the two main traditions of Indian Buddhist philosophy.
Professor Walser argues that the cogency of such arguments is undermined when the historical context of the original argument is misunderstood
From the perspective of the comparative philosophy of religion, it is intriguing that there are those who argue that a true commitment to the authority of sacred text requires the rejection of a divine author for it.
This presentation will draw on the pluralistic structures of Chinese religion to propose a critical re-examination of conventional Western-derived norms and values of religious pluralism.
Obviously no single presentation is going to answer those questions, but this one will attempt to shed some light on how White Evangelical Christians who envision America as a sacred nation adhering to a Christian moral code came to support the presidency and re-election of a man who claimed never to have felt the need to ask God for forgiveness.
I will argue that MMK 24:18, rather than steering us away from any metaphysical commitments at all, insists only that "emptiness" means exactly the same thing as "conditioned co-arising" (pratītyasamutpāda), which is a very specific Buddhist causal theory about the interdependence of all things.
In this wide-ranging conversation with one of the most prominent Western journalists on China, Ian Johnson will offer a reflection on his over 20 years of experience in China
Drawing on history, public opinion surveys, and personal experience, Robert P. Jones, in his newly published book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, delivers a provocative examination of the unholy relationship between American Christianity and white supremacy, and issues an urgent call for white Christians to reckon with this legacy for the sake of themselves and the nation.
The Buddhist approach to ethics rejects the image of an autonomous self independently giving rise through mysterious free agent causation to actions.
Buddhist accounts of the ultimate truth, especially in the Mahāyāna tradition, emphasize the fact that it is beyond all conception and inexpressible, yet knowable.
This talk is a survey and investigation of the topography of the intellectual terrain of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, via the synthetic concept of Qing thought, in which there are coherent patterns and modes of intellection and argumentation.
We want to host this meeting as an opportunity for the new MA students to meet the returning students.
Buddhism does not assume the existence of a creator god, and so it might seem as if the question of creation, of how and why the world came into existence was not of great interest for Buddhist thinkers
This talk, based on Professor Stone's recent book, Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan, explores how the ideal of dying with right mindfulness was appropriated, disseminated, and transformed in premodern Japan based on Chinese precedents, focusing on the late tenth through early fourteenth centuries.
In this lecture, Patton discusses two case studies to outline the origins of what she calls the “eruptive public spaces” in which the works of scholars of religion are still vehemently, and at times violently, objected to by members of the religious communities featured in the work.
This lecture examines which key religious features tended to be lost or neglected in the process of transplantation and translation, such as the ability to construct continental-style rhyming verses, as well as those elements that were rediscovered or enhanced, including a new emphasis on theatrical, practical, and martial arts in addition to literary and visual virtuosities imported from the mainland.
