A Vision of What Might Be: The Pandemic, Protests, and Possibilities
Keywords:
social justice, wisdom, Buddha, MLK, U. S. society, spiritual practice, memoirAbstract
Times of crisis offer us opportunities for radical transformation. The past two years of the Covid pandemic have laid bare, in glaring fashion, the social, economic, and judicial inequities in American life. Even so, some moral and religious leaders have provided us with teachings and guidelines for a new vision of what we might become. Here, based on my experience as a Professor of Religion and an African American Tibetan Buddhist scholar and practitioner, I draw on the teachings of two of these visionaries—the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Buddha—to help us to imagine the moral and spiritual transformations that might be possible.
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