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“Even the Rich Suffer”: An Interview with Google’s Jolly Good Fellow Chade-Meng Tan

By Max Zahn

…actice spirituality, with or without religious belief. I don’t really care about Buddhism, but I care tremendously about dharma, which is defined as universal law. I care especially about the aspects of universal law relating to suffering and liberation from suffering. They’re everywhere. I’m not trying to promote Buddhism but dharma. If I’m careful about doing this, it has the potential to unite religions. It has the potential to unite everybody…

On the Ethics of the Tibetan Self-Immolations

By José Cabezón

…rated on others? In these cases difficult choices have to be made. Tibetan Buddhism, as a form of Mahāyāna Buddhism, is a tradition whose ethics, the ethics of the bodhisattva, is founded on the principles of compassion and altruism, believed to “trump” the ideal of no-harm. Hence, in certain instances, Mahāyāna Buddhism permits acts that would otherwise be considered acts of violence when these have a higher purpose, when it brings about the welf…

Religion vs. Science: America’s Perilous Fight

By Edward J. Larson

…ay nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.” The 8,000-member National Association of Biology Teachers takes a similar tack. In a formal statement initially adopted during the 1980s in opposition to young-earth creationism and always controversial among theists, the group defined evolution as “an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process of temporal descent with grad…

Better Science Through God?

By Nathan Schneider

…held up as a champion of science-like inquiry, was really no more hopeful about science than about religious speculation; and materialism, especially wielded by Nazis and Stalinists, corrupted evolutionary science much more than advancing it. The origin story Fuller offers for the scientific mentality is not to be found with Galileo against the Inquisition, or with Francis Bacon’s experimental method, but in Genesis itself: God’s promise to Abrah…

Zen and the Art of Zombie Killing: A Buddhist Anti-Tech Manifesto

By Max Zahn

…d online community called Buddhist Geeks that examines the intersection of Buddhism and technology. “Insanity is directly proportional to the number of hours spent at a tech startup.” In Horn’s view, techies turn to Buddhism, especially the practice of mindfulness, because it calms them down. Simple as that. Tech isn’t any old community—it’s an industry, divided like any other into managers and employees. It is management that has taken up mindful…

Who Would the Buddha Bomb?

By Danny Fisher

…being ‘safe’ from terrorists, and so on.” Buddhist Americans have only really scratched the surface of exploring, let alone responding to these issues—this is where Loncke, Haney, and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship have truly contributed to the development of Buddhism in America. Speaking about the photo and the latest conversation it has launched, Loncke is optimistic about what may come: “My greatest hope is that the conversation on militarism c…

Top Ten Religion & Science Stories of 2009

By Lauri Lebo

…together of two ways of looking at the world. Other times the stories were about science explaining our religious notions; still others sought to use religion to deny science. So, in a decidedly unscientific assessment, here are the top religion-meets-science stories from the Year of Darwin: 1. “Junk Science” in Texas Classrooms In April, fundamentalist Christian members of the Texas Board of Education inserted intelligent design code words into i…

Are Evangelicals Really That “Science-Friendly”?

By Andrew Aghapour

…re the most likely to consult religious authorities if they had a question about science. Furthermore, Ecklund’s data reveals something about those evangelicals who chose the alternative positions of “independence” and “collaboration.” 2) Science-Friendliness for Evangelicals is Conditional 48.4 percent of evangelicals surveyed agreed with the “collaboration” view of science and religion, which maintains that “each can be used to help support th…

Teaching the Dalai Lama’s Monks: Better Religion Through Science

By Arri Eisen

…ith 91 monks and nuns. The project is designed for monks and nuns to learn science and for us to learn Buddhism and Tibetan culture, but also for us to simultaneously build the capacity for the Tibetans eventually to take over the science teaching and learning. If you’re like many of my administrators and colleagues, you might be asking, “What?! Beyond the coolness factor, what in the world is the point of teaching science to a bunch of monks half…

Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence

By Michael Jerryson

…ature of Western understanding. And while it contributed to the history of Buddhism, this presentation of an otherworldly Buddhism ultimately robbed Buddhists of their humanity. Thupten Tsering, the co-director of “Windhorse,” encapsulates the effects of two-dimensional portrayal in a 1999 interview with the New York Times. “They see Tibetans as cute, sweet, warmhearted. I tell people, when you cut me, I bleed just like you.” In an effort to comba…