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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Aspects of religions (non-Christian) > Religious institutions & organizations
Anne Blackburn explores the emergence of a predominant Buddhist
monastic culture in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka, while asking
larger questions about the place of monasticism and education in
the creation of religious and national traditions. Her historical
analysis of the Siyam Nikaya, a monastic order responsible for
innovations in Buddhist learning, challenges the conventional view
that a stable and monolithic Buddhism existed in South and
Southeast Asia prior to the advent of British colonialism in the
nineteenth century. The rise of the Siyam Nikaya and the social
reorganization that accompanied it offer important evidence of
dynamic local traditions. Blackburn supports this view with fresh
readings of Buddhist texts and their links to social life beyond
the monastery.
Comparing eighteenth-century Sri Lankan Buddhist monastic
education to medieval Christian and other contexts, the author
examines such issues as bilingual commentarial practice, the
relationship between clerical and "popular" religious cultures, the
place of preaching in the constitution of "textual communities,"
and the importance of public displays of learning to social
prestige. Blackburn draws upon indigenous historical narratives,
which she reads as rhetorical texts important to monastic politics
and to the naturalization of particular attitudes toward kingship
and monasticism. Moreover, she questions both conventional views on
"traditional" Theravadin Buddhism and the "Buddhist modernism" /
"Protestant Buddhism" said to characterize nineteenth-century Sri
Lanka. This book provides not only a pioneering critique of
post-Orientalist scholarship on South Asia, but also a resolution
to the historiographic impasse created by post-Orientalist readings
of South Asian history.
Wendy Cadge and Shelly Rambo demonstrate the urgent need,
highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, to position the long history
and practice of chaplaincy within the rapidly changing landscape of
American religion and spirituality. This book provides a
much-needed road map for training and renewing chaplains across a
professional continuum that spans major sectors of American
society, including hospitals, prisons, universities, the military,
and nursing homes. Written by a team of multidisciplinary experts
and drawing on ongoing research at the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at
Brandeis University, Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the
Twenty-First Century identifies three central
competencies-individual, organizational, and meaning-making-that
all chaplains must have, and it provides the resources for building
those skills. The book, which features profiles of working
chaplains, positions intersectional issues of religious diversity,
race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity
as central to the future of chaplaincy as a profession.
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