01-26-2008, 02:28 AM
http://www.pluralism.org/events/neh/letter.php
NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers:
"World Religions in America"
Dear Colleague Letter
Dear Colleague,
Thank you for expressing an interest in my summer seminar on World Religions in America, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I look forward to bringing teachers from across the United States and from diverse disciplines and subject areas to explore together the new religious diversity of the United States.
In the past thirty years, the religious landscape of the United States has changed significantly, in part because of the 1965 immigration act and the new population of immigrants who have come to the U.S. from all over the world. Today there are Islamic centers and mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples and meditation centers, and Sikh gurdwaras in virtually every major American city. And today the encounter between people of different religious and cultural traditions takes place not only in the international arena, but in our own cities and neighborhoods, schools and city councils.
School teachers, as you well know, are at the forefront of grappling with this new world of religious diversity. There is no place where the impact of America's new religious reality is felt more forcefully than in America's schools. In the Dallas Independent School District, for example, there are Muslims and Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Jains, Vietnamese and Laotian Buddhists, and Christians of dozens of denominations. Both the community and the classroom are multireligious, so the study of comparative religion is not simply the study of "other" ways of life in some other part the world. It is germane to the understanding of the communities of which we are a part.
Those who teach social studies, world history, American history, or American regional studies increasingly seek to incorporate the history and influence of religious traditions and communities into the curriculum. This seminar is especially intended to benefit school teachers for whom the study of the world's religions in the American context will provide the intellectual grounding and stimulus for curricular growth in their own teaching.
My own work as a scholar of the religious traditions of India has taken a turn toward America during the past ten years. It began because of the changing demography of Harvard University and the challenges this posed to me as a scholar and teacher. In the early 1990s, the arrival of the children of the new post-1965 immigration in our colleges and universities signaled the emergence in America of a new cultural and religious reality about which I knew next to nothing. At that point I had plenty of research experience in India, but I had never been to an American mosque, I had never visited a Sikh community in my own country, and I had no idea how a Hindu community might go about building a temple in Albany or Nashville. I felt the very ground under my feet as a teacher and a scholar begin to shift. My researcher's eye began to refocus --from Banaras to Boston, from Delhi to Detroit.
It became clear to me that the very shape of our traditional fields of study in the Humanities was inadequate to the study of this new world. In the field of religious studies, those of us who study Buddhism, Islam, or Hinduism traditionally earned our academic stripes in some other part of the world doing language studies, textual editions and translations, and fieldwork. Now it became clear that to teach a course on Hinduism, I would also have to know something about Hinduism in America. To teach a course on World Religions, I would also have to know something about World Religions in America.
In 1991, I developed the research seminar "World Religions in New England" and shortly thereafter, launched the Pluralism Project. We set out to study and document the new religious reality of America, beginning right here in Boston. From the initial research of the seminar, we published the book World Religions in Boston; in 1997, we published the CD-ROM, "On Common Ground: World Religions in America." Over the years, the Pluralism Project has involved over eighty students in summer research throughout the United States; in addition, some thirty affiliated research projects in colleges and universities are currently participating in this work.
This six week seminar provides an opportunity for secondary school teachers to study the world's religions in the American context and to benefit from the wealth of religious communities here in Boston. It enables seminar participants to make use of the resources of the Pluralism Project, to explore the full range of materials in the CD-ROM On Common Ground: World Religions in America, to have first-hand experience of the religious communities of Boston through weekly field visits, and to undertake a specific research project on a subject closest to their own academic or teaching interests. There will also be informal barbecues and gatherings at the residence of the Project Director, after which seminarians will share their field reports.
Our first goal in this seminar is to review America's immigration history through the lens of our many religions. Historians tell us that America has always been a land of many religions. There was a vast, textured pluralism already here in the multiple life-ways of the Native Peoples --even before the European settlers came to these shores. Those who came across the Atlantic had diverse religious traditions --Spanish and French Catholics, British Anglicans and Quakers, Sephardic Jews, and Dutch Reform Christians. As we will see, this diversity broadened over the course of three hundred years of settlement. Many of the Africans brought to America with the slave trade were Muslims. The Chinese and Japanese who came to seek their fortune in the mines and farms of the West had Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian traditions. Eastern European Jews, and Irish and Italian Catholics also arrived in force in the nineteenth century, and both Christian and Muslim immigrants came from the Middle East. Punjabis from Northwest India came in the first decade of the twentieth century with Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim traditions. The stories of all these peoples are an important part of America's immigration history.
The immigrants of last three decades, however, have expanded the diversity of our religious life dramatically, indeed exponentially. Buddhists have come from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and Korea; Hindus from India, East Africa, and Trinidad; Muslims from Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Middle East, and Nigeria; Sikhs and Jains have also come from India, and Zoroastrians from both India and Iran. New Jewish immigrants have come from Russia and the Ukraine, and the face of American Christianity has also changed with large Latino, Filipino, and Vietnamese Catholic communities, Chinese and Brazilian Pentecostal communities, Korean Presbyterians, Indian Mar Thomas, and Egyptian Copts. This new post-1965 phase of American immigration has made the United States the most religiously diverse nation on earth. It is this new diversity that is the special focus of our study.
A second goal of the summer seminar will be to enable participants to learn substantively about the history and contemporary reality of three religious traditions in the American context: Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. A week will be devoted to each of these traditions, tracing its history in the U.S. and paying special attention to the new challenges and changes that have come with the dynamic post-1965 immigration.
Religious traditions are dynamic not static, changing not fixed, more like rivers of faith than buildings or religious establishments. The history of religion is not over, something of the past, but is an ongoing, dynamic process. America today is an exciting place to study the ongoing history of these rivers of faith --as Buddhism becomes a truly "American" religion, as Islam develops the organizational infrastructure to participate in political and civil society, as Hindus from all over India renegotiate the meaning of Hinduism on American soil, and as Christians and Jews articulate their own faith anew in the light of their encounter with other faiths. Even humanists, secularists, and atheists have to rethink what their worldviews mean in the context of a more complex religious reality.
A third goal of the summer seminar will be to ask persistently the question of American "identity" in the face of expanding religious diversity. What will the idea and vision of America become as we embrace all this diversity? The questions that emerge from the new encounter of religions in the United States today go to the very heart of who we see ourselves to be as a people. They are not trivial questions, for they force us to ask in one way or another: Who do we mean when we invoke the first words of our Constitution, "We the people of the United States of America?" Who do we mean when we say "we?" This is a challenge of citizenship, to be sure, for it has to do with the imagined community of which we consider ourselves a part. It is also an intellectual challenge requiring ongoing study.
Just as our religious traditions are dynamic, so is whatever we mean by America. What is "American" is not finished, not embedded in history alone, but is still underway. The motto of the Republic, E Pluribus Unum, "From Many, One," is not an accomplished fact, but an ideal that Americans must continue to claim. The story of America's many peoples and the creation of one nation is still an unfinished story in which the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are continually being brought into being, in ways that must be the subject of critical study and analysis.
WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION
The Religious Dimensions of America's Multiculturalism; Immigration and Pluralism. Field visits to a number of Boston Centers such as the Islamic Center of New England, the Thousand Buddha Temple, the Sri Lakshmi Temple, the Jain Center of Greater Boston, and the Guru Ram Das Ashram.
WEEK 2: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, CHRISTIAN AMERICA, AND THE TRIPLE MELTING POT
Questions of Religious Freedom; America as a "Three Religion Country" -- Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Independent field visits and field reports.
WEEK 3: BUDDHISM IN AMERICA
A History of Asian Buddhism in America; Reshaping Buddhism in America. Screening of "Becoming the Buddha in L.A." Field visits to Buddhist Boston.
WEEK 4: THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA IN AMERICA
A History of Hinduism in America; Reshaping Hinduism in America. Field visits to Hindu sites and second session of field reports.
WEEK 5: ISLAM IN AMERICA
A History of Islam in America; Reshaping Islam in America. Field visits to Muslim sites.
WEEK 6: PERSPECTIVES ON MULTIRELIGIOUS AMERICA
Pluralism in America; Forum on Religion in Multicultural America; Seminar Wrap-up.
The extended syllabus for the seminar is available on-line at www.pluralism.org/events/neh/syllabus.php.
The seminar will meet for three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week, 1.5 hours in the morning and 1.5 hours in the afternoon.
It is expected that participants be regularly prepared for class discussion, using On Common Ground, its anthology of documents, and outside reading. There will be weekly field visits to Boston area religious centers, including a mosque, a Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple, a Sikh gurdwara, and one of the historic churches or synagogues. Seminar participants will keep a descriptive and reflective journal of these field visits. Informal Sunday evening gatherings will offer an opportunity for discussion of these field visits.
Each participant will be expected to undertake his or her own research project during the seminar. The project might be historical or contemporary research on a particular religious tradition (For example: African American Islam in the 1930s, Vipassana Retreat Centers, Buddhist women teachers, or Hindu Temple architecture); field research on a community in the Boston area (For example: the Cambridge Zen Center community, Boston's Vedanta Society, the Cambodian Buddhist temple of Lowell), or the study of a topic of special relevance to the participant's locale (For example: Hindu communities in Ohio, Islamic history in South Carolina, Sikh history of California). Individual appointments will be available with me and with the Project Coordinator Ellie Pierce, during the course of the seminar to discuss the individual research projects.
Participants in this seminar will be granted "Officer" status at Harvard University, with access to a wealth of resources. The seminar meetings will be held in the Barker Humanities Center, located very close to Harvard Yard, and home to the Committee on the Study of Religion. Seminarians may choose to have a carrel in Widener Library, or to avail themselves of Harvard's vast library system. Email accounts, and access to computer labs, will be available. For the small cost of an athletic sticker, Seminarians will enjoy access to excellent athletic facilities. The university also offers an array of free or low-cost cultural opportunities, including fine arts, film, and music programs.
The resources of the Pluralism Project office will prove invaluable to participants, with archives and a resource room that include a selection of publications, primary materials and literature from religious centers across the United States, photographic images, news clippings, and student research papers.
Off-campus, the greater Boston area offers wonderful recreational and cultural opportunities in the summer. But beyond the cafes and restaurants, the winding paths along the Charles, the museums and performance centers, Boston offers incredible religious diversity. Our classroom will extend far beyond the halls of Harvard to the greater Boston area: to the temples, mosques, gurdwaras, and other religious centers that form the new religious landscape of America, and that inform this NEH summer seminar.
Housing will be available on the Harvard campus at a cost of $1600 for the six-week period. For those preferring to live off-campus, we will assist you in your search, which can be facilitated through the Harvard Housing Office.
Participants in this seminar will receive a stipend of $3,700. A check for the first half of the stipend will be waiting for you at the first meeting of the seminar. The second check will be ready for you two-three weeks after the first.
Application materials, including the guidelines and application form, are (enclosed/) available on-line at www.pluralism.org/events/neh/index.php. Once you have completed the application, please make two copies, so that you can send me three complete. This will be very helpful in expediting the selection process, and your cooperation will be much appreciated. Your completed application should be postmarked no later than March 1, 2000, and should be addressed as follows:
The Pluralism Project
Harvard University
201 Vanserg Building
25 Francis Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Attn: Ellie Pierce
Perhaps the most important part of the seminar application is the three-page application essay. This essay should include any personal and academic information that is relevant; reasons for applying to the seminar; your interest, both intellectual and personal, in the topic; qualifications to do the work of the seminar and make a contribution to it; what you hope to accomplish by participation; and the relation of the study to your teaching.
If you have any questions about the seminar or the application process feel free to call the Seminar Coordinator, Ellie Pierce, at (617) 496-2481 or email her at epierce@fas.harvard.edu.
Again, thank you for your interest in the upcoming NEH Summer Seminar, "World Religions in America." I look forward to learning more about your interests and background, and look forward to the opportunity to engage and explore this subject with a group of educators next summer.
All the best,
Diana L. Eck
Professor of Comparative Religion, Harvard University
Director, The Pluralism Project
NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers:
"World Religions in America"
Dear Colleague Letter
Dear Colleague,
Thank you for expressing an interest in my summer seminar on World Religions in America, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I look forward to bringing teachers from across the United States and from diverse disciplines and subject areas to explore together the new religious diversity of the United States.
In the past thirty years, the religious landscape of the United States has changed significantly, in part because of the 1965 immigration act and the new population of immigrants who have come to the U.S. from all over the world. Today there are Islamic centers and mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples and meditation centers, and Sikh gurdwaras in virtually every major American city. And today the encounter between people of different religious and cultural traditions takes place not only in the international arena, but in our own cities and neighborhoods, schools and city councils.
School teachers, as you well know, are at the forefront of grappling with this new world of religious diversity. There is no place where the impact of America's new religious reality is felt more forcefully than in America's schools. In the Dallas Independent School District, for example, there are Muslims and Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Jains, Vietnamese and Laotian Buddhists, and Christians of dozens of denominations. Both the community and the classroom are multireligious, so the study of comparative religion is not simply the study of "other" ways of life in some other part the world. It is germane to the understanding of the communities of which we are a part.
Those who teach social studies, world history, American history, or American regional studies increasingly seek to incorporate the history and influence of religious traditions and communities into the curriculum. This seminar is especially intended to benefit school teachers for whom the study of the world's religions in the American context will provide the intellectual grounding and stimulus for curricular growth in their own teaching.
My own work as a scholar of the religious traditions of India has taken a turn toward America during the past ten years. It began because of the changing demography of Harvard University and the challenges this posed to me as a scholar and teacher. In the early 1990s, the arrival of the children of the new post-1965 immigration in our colleges and universities signaled the emergence in America of a new cultural and religious reality about which I knew next to nothing. At that point I had plenty of research experience in India, but I had never been to an American mosque, I had never visited a Sikh community in my own country, and I had no idea how a Hindu community might go about building a temple in Albany or Nashville. I felt the very ground under my feet as a teacher and a scholar begin to shift. My researcher's eye began to refocus --from Banaras to Boston, from Delhi to Detroit.
It became clear to me that the very shape of our traditional fields of study in the Humanities was inadequate to the study of this new world. In the field of religious studies, those of us who study Buddhism, Islam, or Hinduism traditionally earned our academic stripes in some other part of the world doing language studies, textual editions and translations, and fieldwork. Now it became clear that to teach a course on Hinduism, I would also have to know something about Hinduism in America. To teach a course on World Religions, I would also have to know something about World Religions in America.
In 1991, I developed the research seminar "World Religions in New England" and shortly thereafter, launched the Pluralism Project. We set out to study and document the new religious reality of America, beginning right here in Boston. From the initial research of the seminar, we published the book World Religions in Boston; in 1997, we published the CD-ROM, "On Common Ground: World Religions in America." Over the years, the Pluralism Project has involved over eighty students in summer research throughout the United States; in addition, some thirty affiliated research projects in colleges and universities are currently participating in this work.
This six week seminar provides an opportunity for secondary school teachers to study the world's religions in the American context and to benefit from the wealth of religious communities here in Boston. It enables seminar participants to make use of the resources of the Pluralism Project, to explore the full range of materials in the CD-ROM On Common Ground: World Religions in America, to have first-hand experience of the religious communities of Boston through weekly field visits, and to undertake a specific research project on a subject closest to their own academic or teaching interests. There will also be informal barbecues and gatherings at the residence of the Project Director, after which seminarians will share their field reports.
Our first goal in this seminar is to review America's immigration history through the lens of our many religions. Historians tell us that America has always been a land of many religions. There was a vast, textured pluralism already here in the multiple life-ways of the Native Peoples --even before the European settlers came to these shores. Those who came across the Atlantic had diverse religious traditions --Spanish and French Catholics, British Anglicans and Quakers, Sephardic Jews, and Dutch Reform Christians. As we will see, this diversity broadened over the course of three hundred years of settlement. Many of the Africans brought to America with the slave trade were Muslims. The Chinese and Japanese who came to seek their fortune in the mines and farms of the West had Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian traditions. Eastern European Jews, and Irish and Italian Catholics also arrived in force in the nineteenth century, and both Christian and Muslim immigrants came from the Middle East. Punjabis from Northwest India came in the first decade of the twentieth century with Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim traditions. The stories of all these peoples are an important part of America's immigration history.
The immigrants of last three decades, however, have expanded the diversity of our religious life dramatically, indeed exponentially. Buddhists have come from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and Korea; Hindus from India, East Africa, and Trinidad; Muslims from Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Middle East, and Nigeria; Sikhs and Jains have also come from India, and Zoroastrians from both India and Iran. New Jewish immigrants have come from Russia and the Ukraine, and the face of American Christianity has also changed with large Latino, Filipino, and Vietnamese Catholic communities, Chinese and Brazilian Pentecostal communities, Korean Presbyterians, Indian Mar Thomas, and Egyptian Copts. This new post-1965 phase of American immigration has made the United States the most religiously diverse nation on earth. It is this new diversity that is the special focus of our study.
A second goal of the summer seminar will be to enable participants to learn substantively about the history and contemporary reality of three religious traditions in the American context: Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. A week will be devoted to each of these traditions, tracing its history in the U.S. and paying special attention to the new challenges and changes that have come with the dynamic post-1965 immigration.
Religious traditions are dynamic not static, changing not fixed, more like rivers of faith than buildings or religious establishments. The history of religion is not over, something of the past, but is an ongoing, dynamic process. America today is an exciting place to study the ongoing history of these rivers of faith --as Buddhism becomes a truly "American" religion, as Islam develops the organizational infrastructure to participate in political and civil society, as Hindus from all over India renegotiate the meaning of Hinduism on American soil, and as Christians and Jews articulate their own faith anew in the light of their encounter with other faiths. Even humanists, secularists, and atheists have to rethink what their worldviews mean in the context of a more complex religious reality.
A third goal of the summer seminar will be to ask persistently the question of American "identity" in the face of expanding religious diversity. What will the idea and vision of America become as we embrace all this diversity? The questions that emerge from the new encounter of religions in the United States today go to the very heart of who we see ourselves to be as a people. They are not trivial questions, for they force us to ask in one way or another: Who do we mean when we invoke the first words of our Constitution, "We the people of the United States of America?" Who do we mean when we say "we?" This is a challenge of citizenship, to be sure, for it has to do with the imagined community of which we consider ourselves a part. It is also an intellectual challenge requiring ongoing study.
Just as our religious traditions are dynamic, so is whatever we mean by America. What is "American" is not finished, not embedded in history alone, but is still underway. The motto of the Republic, E Pluribus Unum, "From Many, One," is not an accomplished fact, but an ideal that Americans must continue to claim. The story of America's many peoples and the creation of one nation is still an unfinished story in which the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are continually being brought into being, in ways that must be the subject of critical study and analysis.
WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION
The Religious Dimensions of America's Multiculturalism; Immigration and Pluralism. Field visits to a number of Boston Centers such as the Islamic Center of New England, the Thousand Buddha Temple, the Sri Lakshmi Temple, the Jain Center of Greater Boston, and the Guru Ram Das Ashram.
WEEK 2: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, CHRISTIAN AMERICA, AND THE TRIPLE MELTING POT
Questions of Religious Freedom; America as a "Three Religion Country" -- Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Independent field visits and field reports.
WEEK 3: BUDDHISM IN AMERICA
A History of Asian Buddhism in America; Reshaping Buddhism in America. Screening of "Becoming the Buddha in L.A." Field visits to Buddhist Boston.
WEEK 4: THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA IN AMERICA
A History of Hinduism in America; Reshaping Hinduism in America. Field visits to Hindu sites and second session of field reports.
WEEK 5: ISLAM IN AMERICA
A History of Islam in America; Reshaping Islam in America. Field visits to Muslim sites.
WEEK 6: PERSPECTIVES ON MULTIRELIGIOUS AMERICA
Pluralism in America; Forum on Religion in Multicultural America; Seminar Wrap-up.
The extended syllabus for the seminar is available on-line at www.pluralism.org/events/neh/syllabus.php.
The seminar will meet for three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week, 1.5 hours in the morning and 1.5 hours in the afternoon.
It is expected that participants be regularly prepared for class discussion, using On Common Ground, its anthology of documents, and outside reading. There will be weekly field visits to Boston area religious centers, including a mosque, a Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple, a Sikh gurdwara, and one of the historic churches or synagogues. Seminar participants will keep a descriptive and reflective journal of these field visits. Informal Sunday evening gatherings will offer an opportunity for discussion of these field visits.
Each participant will be expected to undertake his or her own research project during the seminar. The project might be historical or contemporary research on a particular religious tradition (For example: African American Islam in the 1930s, Vipassana Retreat Centers, Buddhist women teachers, or Hindu Temple architecture); field research on a community in the Boston area (For example: the Cambridge Zen Center community, Boston's Vedanta Society, the Cambodian Buddhist temple of Lowell), or the study of a topic of special relevance to the participant's locale (For example: Hindu communities in Ohio, Islamic history in South Carolina, Sikh history of California). Individual appointments will be available with me and with the Project Coordinator Ellie Pierce, during the course of the seminar to discuss the individual research projects.
Participants in this seminar will be granted "Officer" status at Harvard University, with access to a wealth of resources. The seminar meetings will be held in the Barker Humanities Center, located very close to Harvard Yard, and home to the Committee on the Study of Religion. Seminarians may choose to have a carrel in Widener Library, or to avail themselves of Harvard's vast library system. Email accounts, and access to computer labs, will be available. For the small cost of an athletic sticker, Seminarians will enjoy access to excellent athletic facilities. The university also offers an array of free or low-cost cultural opportunities, including fine arts, film, and music programs.
The resources of the Pluralism Project office will prove invaluable to participants, with archives and a resource room that include a selection of publications, primary materials and literature from religious centers across the United States, photographic images, news clippings, and student research papers.
Off-campus, the greater Boston area offers wonderful recreational and cultural opportunities in the summer. But beyond the cafes and restaurants, the winding paths along the Charles, the museums and performance centers, Boston offers incredible religious diversity. Our classroom will extend far beyond the halls of Harvard to the greater Boston area: to the temples, mosques, gurdwaras, and other religious centers that form the new religious landscape of America, and that inform this NEH summer seminar.
Housing will be available on the Harvard campus at a cost of $1600 for the six-week period. For those preferring to live off-campus, we will assist you in your search, which can be facilitated through the Harvard Housing Office.
Participants in this seminar will receive a stipend of $3,700. A check for the first half of the stipend will be waiting for you at the first meeting of the seminar. The second check will be ready for you two-three weeks after the first.
Application materials, including the guidelines and application form, are (enclosed/) available on-line at www.pluralism.org/events/neh/index.php. Once you have completed the application, please make two copies, so that you can send me three complete. This will be very helpful in expediting the selection process, and your cooperation will be much appreciated. Your completed application should be postmarked no later than March 1, 2000, and should be addressed as follows:
The Pluralism Project
Harvard University
201 Vanserg Building
25 Francis Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Attn: Ellie Pierce
Perhaps the most important part of the seminar application is the three-page application essay. This essay should include any personal and academic information that is relevant; reasons for applying to the seminar; your interest, both intellectual and personal, in the topic; qualifications to do the work of the seminar and make a contribution to it; what you hope to accomplish by participation; and the relation of the study to your teaching.
If you have any questions about the seminar or the application process feel free to call the Seminar Coordinator, Ellie Pierce, at (617) 496-2481 or email her at epierce@fas.harvard.edu.
Again, thank you for your interest in the upcoming NEH Summer Seminar, "World Religions in America." I look forward to learning more about your interests and background, and look forward to the opportunity to engage and explore this subject with a group of educators next summer.
All the best,
Diana L. Eck
Professor of Comparative Religion, Harvard University
Director, The Pluralism Project