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The Buddhist monk who blessed Baltimore City Hall with a worship aide traveled to Detroit to do some outreach on a community college campus. Terry wrote earlier in the week about the interesting church-state issues raised by a Buddhist doing religious work on public property.
Baltimore Sun reporter Nichole Fuller recently turned in an interesting story that, the more I think about it, raises some interesting questions about the separation of Buddhism and state.
Writing about Buddhism always baffles me. But I do love reading about it, and the most recent case of mysterious disappearance of a 15-year-old boy, whose followers claim he is an incarnation of the Buddha, is a thriller.
A casual glance at the headlines would indicate that reporters love to cover stories about changes to public school curriculum. Especially changes to public school curriculum that allegedly are motivated by political or religious viewpoints. The debate over inclusion of intelligent design theories in textbooks has been hot for months. Reporters are still going crazy over the big, bad intelligent designers and their Pennsylvania and Kansas curriculum battles.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the media coverage surrounding the Dalai Lama’s visit to the nation’s capitol. Here The Washington Post has him speaking on the hot button issue that is science, which from a man in his position as a worldwide religious leader, is not only a great way for the Dalai Lama to break into the headlines, but also an interesting cultural twist. Here’s what he had to say:
In a story for The San Diego Union-Tribune, Kimberly Winston shows how much a talented religion reporter can do with something as simple as a locally sponsored conference about a dead man with a popular following. In this case, it helps that the dead man is Thomas Merton, the agnostic-turned-Catholic-monk who was pursuing an interest in Buddhism by the time he died in 1968. (If you’re a fan of Matthew Fox, you may believe that sentence should end with “by the time he was assassinated in 1968.”)
I have had some readers email me asking if I would post my Scripps Howard News Service column for this week, which can be found here.
Let me jump in here quickly to respond to Doug’s post on the issue of Jewish Christians, Buddhist Jews and other hard to define, emerging niche spiritualities. For journalists, this is a case in which it is almost impossible to write anything without starting linguistic warfare.
Talking about yourself at length can be a troubling habit, but Spalding Gray managed to turn it into an art form that transcended mere self-absorption.
