Book Description

Interviews and profiles of spiritual and cultural figures influenced by Buddhism. Based on Trevor Carolan’s interviews, profiles, and essays from the past twenty years, this book offers a fascinating and intimate look at many of the Buddhist (and Buddhist-inspired) spiritual and cultural leaders who have shaped our time. Drawn from the global mosaic of the arts and humanities, environmentalism, and governance, Carolan’s collaborators include Buddhist teachers, poets, writers, activists, and even a politician. Readers will encounter Red Pine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Snyder, Robert Aitken-Roshi, Jerry Brown, the Dalai Lama, Allen Ginsberg, along with many others. They explore engaged practice, East-West ethics, the role of dharma-influenced literature, Beat literature, social and political activism, and more. A rich resource for anyone interested in Buddhism, New World Dharma reveals a Buddhist consciousness responding to the challenge of rethinking what citizenship, community, and the sacred might mean in a global age. “Congratulations to Trevor Carolan for creating a wise and excellent sequence of essays, accurate historical information, and interviews which provide very useful insights and Buddhist time-tracks to both Buddhist and non-Buddhist readers and researchers.” — Ed Sanders, poet and historian “New World Dharma sheds light on a major development in literary and spiritual life by giving a personal, social, internal look into the lives of key Buddhist writers and leaders. In hindsight, it is clear that the influx of Asian spiritual teachings into the West instigated a cultural awakening of major proportion. This book provides a sense of how the fabric of this cultural awakening was woven, thread by thread, over several decades, as the people interviewed were all connected in some way.” — Fran Grace, coeditor of Meditation and the Classroom: Contemplative Pedagogy for Religious Studies