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Podcast: New Books in Buddhist Studies
Episode: Scott A. Mitchell, “Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Contexts” (Bloomsbury, 2016)
Description: Scott A. Mitchell‘s recent monograph, Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Contexts (Bloomsbury, 2016), provides a much-needed up-to-date overview of Buddhism in the United States. To tackle such a large topic, Mitchell draws on Thomas Tweeds work and approaches American Buddhism as comprising worldviews and sets of practices that are born of local circumstances but which can be firmly located within global cultural networks that extend far beyond the local and beyond America.
The book is usefully divided into three sections. In the first, Mitchell provides a short introduction to Buddhism and then discusses the history of Bu...