In the past few decades, the American religious complexion has become considerably more Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist due to immigration and conversion.
On Common Ground, a new CD-ROM from the Pluralism Project at Harvard, is a marvelous key to the new religious diversity of America. Part text, part film, part audiocassette, part slide show, it enables one to move effortlessly between media, and for that matter between religious traditions, across the American continent, and over vast stretches of time. It covers fifteen traditions and highlights eighteen cities across the U.S. as paradigms of the new diversity.
The traditions are introduced by geographical location and by tradition. A third major section concerns historical and contemporary issues in the diversity of American religious traditions.
"A New Religious Landscape" provides a geographic overview of religions in America. Eighteen cities or states are featured on a map of the U.S.; clicking on any one of them takes one to a screen wherein one can choose an essay on the site's history of world religions, a map showing the locations of specific religious centers, or a directory of names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the centers. Clicking on the name of any center takes one to a page providing a short description and picture.
"America's Many Religions" explores the thought and practice of particular traditions. The Buddhist division includes brief introductory essays on Buddhism itself, its history in America, the "Buddhist experience," and contemporary issues for Buddhists in America. In addition, there are time lines for Buddhist history in general and in America; profiles of Buddhist teachers and centers; short movies on the
ordination of a monk, on meditation, and the Greyston (Zen) Bakery in Yonkers, New York; and audio clips on subjects such as the "Zen boom" and "the two Buddhisms (of Asians and non-Asians)." On the Buddhist experience, there are mini-essays with photos on topics such as mindfulness, chanting, koans, various rites, and holidays.
Hinduism receives even more attention. The essays cover the same topics as with Buddhism, and it has similar time lines and profiles. The short films include segments on temple building, the nature of the gods, and puja, and the audio clips concern matters such as images, the Goddess, death, and the future of temples. On the Hindu experience there are many topics such as home altars, consecration of images, ashrams, the sacred thread, and the festivals of specific deities.
Jainism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism are all covered, too, and actually receive coverage disproportionate to their numbers, since it is possible to describe all of their major American religious centers whereas many Hindu and Buddhist centers are omitted.
The CD would be suitable for high school and above. For college students, the content of the CD roughly approximates a short introductory text. It would be most suitable in a course on American religions, but it would also nicely complement a world religions text in a survey course, or do for the "American" week of a course in Hinduism or Buddhism, for instance. Although the information is necessarily limited, it is extremely accessible due to exhaustive cross-indexing and one's ability to jump at the click of a mouse to other places on the CD.
The major problem for teachers and students is price. It costs too much for individual students to have copies and is probably too much for any college library or media center to stock multiple copies for student use. It can, of course, be shown in a "smart" classroom or to a few students at a time on the professor's computer, but the real value of the CD is realized only when students are able to sit down and play around with it.
