History of American Religion, 1865 to Present will consider the varieties of American religious experience while keeping in mind the importance of pluralism in the U.S. context.
Tweed’s The American Encounter with Buddhism was thoroughly disappointing. From my perspective, Tweed’s book deals with the dismantling of an eastern religion, namely Buddhism, and the creation of a completely westernized Asiatic religion, namely an Americanized Pseudo-Buddhism, due to the interaction of western Protestantism and Buddhism. With a Christo-centric outlook that betrays his seminary education, [...]
In The American Encounter with Buddhism, that religion is portrayed as an appealing option for Victorians who had become distanced from Christianity because of its apparent incompatibility with scientific progress. One Buddhist sympathizer exemplifies the views of many in the book when he argues that “the revealed ‘dogmas’ which Christians are compelled to believe-such [...]
In their Foreword to Thomas A. Tweed’s “The American Encounter with Buddhism”, Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein have described the book as “a study that concentrates our attention on processes of cultural contacts more than on complexities of the Buddhist tradition”(page ix) to explain how Buddhism entered the American Victorian life during the [...]
Tweed cites several scholars who voiced the opinion that Buddhism was not a religion. They seem to have based their conclusion on the notion that Buddhism “taught the annihilation of all existence, of all thought, of all individuality and personality (14),” that it “reject[ed]…a personal God and immortal soul” (141). Can you have a religion [...]
I must admit that after reading Thomas Tweed’s The American Encounter with Buddhism 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent,, I was left with the impression that this encounter was a very limited phenomenon. At most, Tweed estimates that there were probably only two or three thousand “Euro-Americans” (or Caucasians) “who thought of themselves [...]