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Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue in Brazil: An Interview with Patricia Palazzo Tsai
As part of interfaith week, we are interviewing a number of people connected with Practical Theology Hub about their work on interfaith dialogue. In this interview we ask our Topic Editor for Buddhism, Patricia Palazzo Tsai, about interfaith dialogue and Buddhist traditions in Brazil. Tell us about yourself. My name is Patricia Palazzo Tsai – a Brazilian Mahāyāna Geluk Buddhist practitioner. I am serving as Topic Editor for Buddhism of Practical Theology Hub, Legal Director of Associação Buddha-Dharma in Brazil, Legal Director of Sakyadhita São Paulo, and I also teach at the undergraduate program of Buddhist Theology at Instituto Pramāṇa. Besides all this I am conducting my PhD research at…
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Christian-Muslim Relations in East Asian History: An Interview with James Harry Morris
As part of interfaith week, we are interviewing a number of people connected with Practical Theology Hub about their work on interfaith dialogue. In this interview we ask our Editor-in-Chief, James Harry Morris, about his work on Christian-Muslim relations in China and Japan. Tell us about yourself. My name is James Harry Morris and alongside serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Practical Theology Hub, I work as an assistant professor at Waseda University. For the past few years, I’ve been working on entitled “The History of Christian-Muslim Relations in China and Japan, 1549-1912” funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant Number: 20K12812) and I continue this work…
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Valuing St Mary’s Cathedral (Urakami Cathedral) in Nagasaki
Recently I lectured at the University of Tokyo on my recent article published by the Journal of Cultural Economy. It proved to be an excellent opportunity for me to take stock of my work on this since late in 2018, thanks to a workshop at the University of Copenhagen and to the editors: Jane Caple and Sarah Roddy. The new article was published in the Journal of Cultural Economy, “Valuing the Urakami Cathedral after the Atomic Bombing: Fundraising and Social Rupture in Nagasaki.” Some questions I considered within this article included whether or how, experiences of communally shared disaster may lead to shared ownership of ruins such as that of…
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Crisis and Calling: Discipleship after Desolation
I learned what feels like to be called growing up in the Texas hill country. We lived in a small town that was just country enough where kids could roam, but just close enough to the city where we couldn’t get into any real trouble. We would wander, climb trees, play in a creek, run over to a friend’s house down the hill, but we knew we always had to listen for mom’s call. She would walk outside, put two fingers in her mouth, and perform that miracle it seems only mothers can do: whistle. She would call us home. I learned early on this is what it means to…
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What is generosity from a Buddhist perspective?
What is generosity? We commonly think of generosity as an action – we give food to someone who asks, we give money to someone on the streets – but generosity can involve many aspects that can be taken for granted. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, generosity (Skt. dāna-pāramitā, Tib. སྦྱིན་པའི་ཕ་རོལ་ཏུ་ཕྱིན་པ་) is one of the pāramitās (a word that is commonly translated as “perfection,” but actually means something closer to “something that goes beyond”), and the practice of this perfection is important for the accumulation of merit (Skt. puṇya, Tib. བསོད་ནམས་). But what is merit? In some popular understandings, merit can be explained using the analogy of money in a bank account –…
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What would Reinhold Niebuhr now be saying about events in Ukraine?
It is of course rash to suggest what Reinhold Niebuhr would now be saying about Ukraine: first because he has been claimed by both those on the left and the right of politics, and secondly it is difficult to separate one’s own views from those one posits might be his. But rash though it may be, the question is still worth asking. First, I suggest, he would be looking critically at the position of NATO supporting governments. What is their responsibility for this tragedy? Even when the cause was undoubtably right, as it was for the Allies in World War II, Niebuhr was keen to eliminate any hint of self-righteousness.…
