A new publication just arrived in my post box yesterday, one I’ve been looking forward to—

Buddhism Beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States, ed. Scott A. Mitchell and Natalie E. Quli, State University of New York Press, 2015.

Full disclosure, well, sorta: both Scott and Natalie were at one time students of mine in the GTU doctoral program, and are now colleagues. And, I was a participant in the conference upon which this collection is based. That said, and despite being (insanely) proud of their accomplishment, I think that this is a valuable collection that will make an important contribution to the field of study.

The collection is divided into four sections, with three essays per section and an afterword.

I. Boundaries, Borders, and Categories

1. Theory and Method in the Study of Buddhism: Toward “Translocative” Analysis, by Thomas A. Tweed

2. Regionalism within North American Buddhism, by Jeff Wilson

3. Two Buddhisms, Three Buddhisms, and Racism, by Wakoh Shannon Hickey

II. Crossing Borders: Transcultural and Translocative Flows

4. “First White Buddhist Priestess”: A Case Study of Sunya Gladys Pratt at the Tacoma Buddhist Temple, by Michihiro Ama

5. Invoking the Dharma Protector: Western Involvement in the Dorje Shugden Controversy, by Jeannine Chandler

6. Zen at a Distance: Isolation and the Development of Distant Membership, by Helen J. Baroni

III. Free-Flowing Dharma Discourses

7. Dharma Images and Identity in American Buddhism, by Richard Hughes Seager

8. Telling Tales Out of School: The Fiction of Buddhism, by Kimberly Beek

9. Mind Full of God: “Jewish Mindfulness” as an Offspring of Western Buddhism in America, by Mira Niculescu

IV. Modernity and Modernities

10. The United States of Jhāna: Varieties of Modern Buddhism in America, by Erik Braun

11. Buddhism and Multiple Modernities, by David L. McMahan

12. Buddhist Modernism as Narrative: A Comparative Study of Jodo Shinshu and Zen, by Natalie E.F. Quli and Scott A. Mitchell

Afterword

Buddhism beyond Borders: Beyond the Rhetorics of Rupture, by Richard K. Payne