Archive
RNS: Gajaweera on Buddhism and Sri Lanka’s Recent Protest Movement
Protests that led to Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resignation have raised questions about the role of Buddhism in the country’s politics. Religion News Service interviewed CRCC’s Nalika Gajaweera about the Buddhist …
Sri Lanka’s Dual Crisis: Ethnic Conflict & the Debt Economy
This article was originally published by Jamhoor. “Except for the home crowd cheering for our national team at an international cricket match, it was the first time I was seeing Sri Lankans …
LA Times: Nalika Gajaweera on How Buddhists Are Responding to Anti-Asian Violence
The March 16, 2021 killing of six women of Asian descent and two others brought Asian Buddhists together across lineages and communities to confront anti-Asian hate. A year later, the LA Times …
Buddhadharma: Reclaiming Our So-Called “Cultural Baggage”
This article was originally published by Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. You can often hear Western meditation-based convert circles use the term “cultural baggage” to refer to the ritualized acts, cosmological ideas, and …
Creating Safe(r) Spaces for Mindfulness of Breath: Experiences of Race in American Mindfulness
CRCC’s Nalika Gajaweera presented her research on how people of color experience race in mindfulness communities that are predominantly white at the Buddhism and Breath Summit. The Buddhism and Breath Summit was …
The Intersection of Gender, Nationalism and Faith-based Giving in Sri Lanka
On September 9 2021, the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities (JLI) held a webinar where CRCC’s Nalika Gajaweera presented her paper on the Intersection of gender, nationalism, and faith-based giving …
Sexual Abuse, Whiteness and Patriarchy in Buddhist Sanghas
North American Buddhist communities have been and continue to be sites of sexual violations and power abuses. “Sexual Abuse, Whiteness and Patriarchy” is the first in a series of conversations that brings …
Sitting in the Fire Together: People of Color Cultivating Radical Resilience in North American Insight Meditation
This article appeared in the Journal of Global Buddhism’s Special Issue on Buddhism and Resilience, Vol 22, No 1 (2021), co-edited by Nalika Gajaweera. Abstract Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in California …
Journal of Global Buddhism: Special Issue on Buddhism and Resilience
Nalika Gajaweera co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Global Buddhism on Buddhism and Resilience with Darcie DeAngelo. Below is an excerpt of their introduction along with a list of articles …
Kushil Gunasekera: ‘The More You Give, the More Will Be Yours to Give’
This article was originally published by The Arrow Journal, with the support of CRCC’s global project on engaged spirituality. “I want to be one of the nicest human beings that this earth …
Sonic Fields of Protection in Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 Pandemic
In a piece for the Asia Research Institute, CRCC’s Nalika Gajaweera and fellow anthropologist Neena Mahadev examine how for Sinhala Buddhists, pirit recitations serve to channel Dharmic energies and intentions during the COVID-19 …
The Mothers of the Righteous Society: Lay Buddhist Women as Agents of the Sinhala Nationalist Imagery
The following is an excerpt of an article by Nalika Gajaweera published in the Journal of Global Buddhism. Read the full article on globalbuddhism.org. Discussions about the gendered experience of Buddhism, especially …
Community Transformation: Outlining a Process for Change
Introduction: Innovation Labs for Congregational Vitality and Community Change Imagine if a church held a gala to raise money for programs to help improve the lives of its neighbors, and everyone in …
Community Transformation: Outlining a Process for Change
Introduction: Innovation Labs for Congregational Vitality and Community Change Imagine if a church held a gala to raise money for programs to help improve the lives of its neighbors, and everyone in …
How Young Women Become Catholic Sisters Today
When Sister Jeanette Kong was growing up in Singapore, she felt herself to be a “jaded and disillusioned young person.” She had been raised in a Catholic family environment with a Catholic …
What’s So Wrong with Mindfulness?
This article originally appeared in Tricycle. “I was stressed out, burned out, and divorced. And then I started doing yoga.” This is how many people I have spoken to in the course …
Studying Faith: Qualitative Methodologies for Studying Religious Communities
Introduction Religion is a fundamental part of human experience and is deeply concerned with questions of “making sense” and “meaning” of our world and our existence. It constitutes the symbols, historical narratives …
Mapping the New Landscape of Religion in Los Feliz
This article originally appeared in BOOM: A Journal of California. Mt. Hollywood Congregational Church was in trouble. Its congregation had become too small to sustain the decaying Los Feliz building that had …
Traditional and Innovative – How Korean Buddhism Stays Relevant
South Korea has become most widely known for its rapidly growing Christian population in the recent past, but nearly a quarter of the country’s population identify as Buddhist. (A majority of the …
Religious, Spiritual and “None of the Above”: How Did Mindfulness Get So Big?
This post originally appeared on Religion Dispatches. The ever-growing popularity of mindfulness—from corporate boardrooms to inner-city schools—has finally made my academic interest a conversation-starter at dinner parties. “Ah, the Buddha was talking about cognitive …