The moral tide of our age pushes us in two directions. One is to uplift the living standards of the billions mired in poverty, struggling each day to survive. The other is to preserve the integrity and sustaining capacity of the planet. A rapid transition to an economy powered by clean and renewable sources of… Read More Bikhu Bodhi: Climate Change is a Moral Issue
On using Buddhism like a drug: Meditation actually makes you feel and experience everything more intensely. So when you feel this intensity, you can do either one of two things: you can either withdraw from the world and go into a cocoon of endless retreats, numbing yourself out with still more meditation, running marathons, or escaping… Read More The Punk Dharma
Pope Francis: The Earth, our home, is beginning to look like an immense pile of filth An extract from Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, the environment and inequality ‘The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of… Read More Guardian UK: Summary of the Papal Encyclical on the Environment “Laudato Si”
by Scott W. Menasco We have a new contributor to Engage!. Scott W. Menasco is a PhD Student studying Buddhism in the United States, a counselor, and a practitioner of a tradition influenced by the Perfect Wisdom Tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. In the United States, the overwhelming amount of non-heritage Buddhist practitioners are white and… Read More Privilege, Knowledge, Power in White Convert Buddhism
Today I begin a new series on the use of the Buddhist concept of emptiness to challenge and dismantle social systems of power and oppression. I translate the term shunyata or emptiness into a description of the process of seeing through social institutions that create powerful controls on our minds, behaviours and relationships. As engaged Buddhists,… Read More Seeing Through: Emptiness and Networks of Power
[Editor’s note; I was supposed to be taking a break from Buddhism this summer. Well, that resolve lasted all of a week. But I’ve been working on my dissertation, and came across pieces that gave me an opening for introducing a series that I have wanted to write for many months: seeing through as a sociological application of shunyata.] Seeing… Read More Seeing Through: Towards a Buddhist Sociology
Ven. Sirinanda is holding a meditation group on the last Fridays of the month at the Dalhousie Multifaith Centre, beginning on Friday, June 26. The group starts at 6:30 PM.
