Teaching Buddhism
New Insights on Understanding and Presenting the Traditions
Edited by Todd Lewis and Gary DeAngelis
Author Information
Todd T. Lewis is the Murray Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities in the Religious Studies Department at The College of the Holy Cross, where he has taught since 1990. Professor Lewis is one of the world's leading authorities on the religions of the central Himalayan region and the social history of Buddhism.
Gary DeAngelis has taught Asian Religions for forty six years at Boston University, Brandeis University, Clark University and for the last twenty nine years at Holy Cross College, also serving as the Associate Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Holy Cross. His primary areas of teaching and scholarship have been Chinese and Japanese religions with a particular emphasis on scared space, pilgrimage, and ritual.
Contributors:
Thomas Borchert is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont. He conducts research on Buddhism and Politics, monastic education and disciplinary issues in Thailand and China. He has had articles published in the Journal of Asian Studies and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Anna Brown is chair of the political science department and Director of the social justice program at Saint Peter's University. Along with James L. Marsh, she co-edited and contributed to Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan's Challenge to Catholic Social Thought (2012). Anna sits zazen with the Morning Star community in Jersey City, NJ and is a Zen student of Roshi Robert Kennedy, S.J. For many years, she joined Daniel Berrigan, S.J. and other members of the Kairos peace community in the work of peacemaking and nonviolent civil disobedience.
David B. Gray is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. His research explores the development of tantric Buddhist traditions in South Asia, and their dissemination in Tibet and East Asia, with a focus on the Yoginitantras, a genre of Buddhist tantric literature that focused on female deities and yogic practices involving the subtle body. He is the author of both The Cakrasamvara Tantra: A Study and Annotated Translation (2007), and The Cakrasamvara Tantra: Editions of the Sanskrit and Tibetan Texts (2012).
Rita M. Gross taught comparative studies in religion her entire career and practiced Buddhism for forty years. Her Ph. D. was the first dissertation on women studies and feminist methodology in the field of religious studies. Her best known book Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (1993), had a major impact on both the practice of Buddhism and academic Buddhist Studies. Her major book on gender and religion is Feminism and Religion-An Introduction (1996).
Ian Harris was co-founder of the UK Association of Buddhist Studies, and served as its president from 2013-2014. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Cumbria and had also held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, the National University of Singapore and Dongguk University, Seoul. During his career he contributed enormously to the fields of Cambodian Buddhism, Buddhism and politics, and Buddhism and environmentalism.
Steven Heine is Professor and Director of Asian Studies at Florida International University. A specialist on the formation of Zen Buddhism in China and its spread to medieval Japan, Heine has published more than two dozen books. His recent works include monographs, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow (2009), Like Cats and Dogs (2013), and Zen Koans (2014), as well as edited volumes, Dogen (2012), and Dogen and Soto Zen (2015).
Hsiao-Lan Hu is an associate professor of Religious Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy. Her monograph This-Worldly Nibbana: A Buddhist-Feminist Social Ethic for Peacemaking in the Global Community (2011) is an interdisciplinary study that combines the philosophy and sociology of early Buddhism, engaged Buddhism, poststructuralist feminist theory, liberation theology, socio-economic studies on globalization, and peace studies.
Paul O. Ingram is Professor Emeritus at Pacific Lutheran University, where he taught history of religions for thirty-four years. His publications include: Wrestling With the Ox, Wrestling With God, Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in an Age of Science, Passing Over and Returning: A Pluralist Theology of Religions, The Process of Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, and Living Without a Why: Mysticism, Pluralism, and the Way of Grace.
Roger Jackson teaches the religions of South Asia at Carleton College, in Minnesota. He has published widely in the areas of Buddhist philosophy, tantric theory and practice, Indian and Tibetan religious poetry, and contemporary Buddhist thought. His recent work has focused primarily on the Great Seal (Mahamudra) meditative traditions of Tibet.
Damien Keown is Emeritus Professor of Buddhist Ethics at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His main research interests are theoretical and applied aspects of Buddhist ethics, with particular reference to contemporary issues. He has published widely and his books have been translated into many languages. In 1994 he founded The Journal of Budddhist Ethics with Charles S. Prebish, with whom he also co-founded the Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism Series.
Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel holds the D.Ed. from Educational Foundations at the University of Hawai`i. Until her retirement in 2012 she taught at Chaminade University in philosophy and religion. There she was Executive Director of the Reverend Yoshi Fujitani Interfaith Program for peace and social justice. She served as President of the Hawai`i Association of International Buddhists, and is a member of the Honpa Hongwanji and Jodo Mission of Hawai`i.
Charles Prebish is Professor Emeritus at both the Pennsylvania State University and Utah State University (where he held the Charles Redd Endowed Chair in Religious Studies). His research focuses on early Indian Buddhism and on the development of Buddhism in the West. His books Buddhist Monastic Discipline (1975) and Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America (1999) are considered classic volumes in Buddhist Studies. He has been an officer in the International Association of Buddhist Studies, and was the co-founder of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion.
Christopher S. Queen lectures on Buddhism and World Religions at Harvard University. He co-edited and contributed to Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism (2003); Engaged Buddhism in the West (2000); American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship (1999); and Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (1996). He is past dean of students for continuing education at Harvard, board president of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, and co-founder of the Dharma Chakra Mission and Academy, Bodhgaya, India.
Vanessa R. Sasson is a professor of Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts Department of Marianopolis College where she has been teaching since 1999. She is also a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, as well as Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University. She has published a number of articles and book chapters, is the author of The Birth of Moses and the Buddha: A Paradigm for the Comparative Study of Religions (2007), co-editor with Jane Marie Law of Imagining the Fetus: The Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture (2009), and editor of Little Buddhas: Children and Childhoods in Buddhist Texts and Traditions (2013).
Mark Siderits recently retired from the Philosophy Department of Seoul National University, where he taught analytic Asian philosophy. His research interests lie in the intersection between classical Indian philosophy on the one hand, and analytic metaphysics and philosophy of language on the other. Among his more recent publications are Buddhism As Philosophy (2007), Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons, 2nd edition (2015) and, together with Shoryu Katsura, Nagarjuna's Middle Way: Mulamadhyamakakarika (2013). He has also edited several collections of work on Indian/analytic philosophy.
Leslie E. Sponsel holds the Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University. Since 1981 he has taught courses and conducted research at the interfaces of ecology, religion, and peace at the University of Hawai`i. Together with his wife, Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel, he has pursued research on Buddhist ecology and environmentalism in general and in Thailand in particular since 1986. His most recent book is Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet Revolution.
John Strong was born in China, brought up in Switzerland, and received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. For the past 35 years, he has been teaching Buddhist Studies at Bates College in Maine. He is the author of numerous articles and several books including The Legend of King Asoka (1983), The Legend and Cult of Upagupta (1992), The Buddha: A Beginner's Guide (2009), Relics of the Buddha (2004), and, most recently, Buddhisms: An Introduction (2015).
William S. Waldron teaches courses on the South Asian religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, Tibetan religion and history, comparative psychologies and philosophies of mind, and theory and method in the study of religion. His publications focus on the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism and its dialogue with modern thought. Professor Waldron has been at Middlebury College since 1996. His monograph, The Buddhist Unconscious: The Alaya-vijñana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought, was published in 2003. He is currently working on an introduction to Yogacara cognitive theory.
Jan Willis is Professor Emerita of Religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and now Visiting Professor of Religion at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA. She taught at Wesleyan for thirty-six years. Willis has authored six books, the latest being her memoir, Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist and Buddhist. In December of 2000, TIME magazine named Willis one of six "spiritual innovators for the new millennium." In 2003, she was a recipient of Wesleyan University's Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
Laszlo Zsolnai is professor and director of the Business Ethics Center at the Corvinus University of Budapest. He is chairman of the Business Ethics Faculty Group of the CEMS (Community of European Management Schools, The Global Alliance in Management Education). He serves as chairman the European SPES Institute in Leuven, Belgium. He is co-founder of the Buddhist Economics Research Network.
