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The Muslim Community Center on New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland.

In 1991, the Pluralism Project at Harvard set out to study multireligious America, beginning right here in Boston. Our research seminar visited the mosque in Quincy built in the shadow of the great cranes of the shipyards by Lebanese immigrants who came early in the century, and we found that there were some 20 other mosques and Islamic centers that are part of the Islamic Council of New England-in Dorchester, Wayland, Cambridge. We went to the spectacular new Sri Lakshmi temple in Ashland, a temple designed by Hindu ritual architects with tall towers decorated with the images of the gods and consecrated with the waters of the Ganges mingled with the waters of the Mississippi, the Colorado, and the Merrimack rivers. We visited half a dozen other Hindu communities in Boston, and two Sikh gurdwaras in Millis and Milford, and a Jain temple in Norwood, housed in a former Swedish Lutheran church. We found a dozen Buddhist meditation centers, with their respective Tibetan, Burmese, Korean, and Japanese lineages of instruction. And we visited the temples of the Cambodian Buddhists in Lowell and Lynn, the Vietnamese in Roslindale and Revere, the Chinese in Quincy and Lexington. Eventually, we published World Religions in Boston, a documentary guide to a city whose Asian population had doubled in 10 years, now a multireligious city.

It was clear that what was true of Boston might well be true of many other American cities. So the Pluralism Project sent a research team of students, multiethnic and multireligious, to study "hometown" America, fanning out across the United States every summer for three years. We were guided by three kinds of questions. First, who is here now in the 1990s? How many Hindu temples are there in Chicago? How many mosques in Oklahoma City? How many Buddhist temples in Houston? Second, how are these traditions changing as they take root in American soil? And third, how is America changing as Americans of many religions begin to appropriate this new multireligious reality and come to terms once again with our foundational commitment to religious freedom and, consequently, religious pluralism?

Stupa containing relics of the Buddha, presented as a gift from Thailand to the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Mission of North America in 1935. The stupa is built on the roof of the Buddhist Church of San Francisco on Pine Street.

We found many remarkable developments. For example, Buddhist communities widely separated in Asia are now neighbors in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago-Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Tibetan Buddhists. Here in America, these Buddhist communities are just beginning to know one another and to meet the distinctive communities of "new Buddhists"-Americans of all races who have come to Buddhism through its meditation practices and its ethics. The Buddhist Sangha Council of Southern California, the Buddhist Council of the Midwest, the Texas Buddhist Association are evidence of the beginning of a new "ecumenical" Buddhism. There are American Buddhist newspapers and magazines, feminist Zen sitting groups, exemplary Buddhist AIDS hospice projects. Today Buddhism is an American religion.

We visited communities that represent the entire spectrum of Islam in America: African American communities, Muslim immigrants from Syria and Lebanon whose forebears came in the early 1900s, and new immigrant Muslims from Africa and South Asia. All of them are in the process of working out what it is to be both Muslim and American. They gather in huge annual conventions in Dayton or in Kansas City to discuss the Muslim family in America or the American public schools. The Islamic Medical Association tackles ethical issues in medical practice, while the Washington-based American Muslim Council facilitates Islamic participation in the American political process.

The Hindu Sri Lakshmi temple in Ashland, Massachusetts.

We found that most of the new religious institutions are invisible. The first generation of American mosques could be found in places like a former watch factory in Queens, a U-Haul dealership in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a gymnasium in Oklahoma City, and a former mattress showroom in Northridge, California. There were Hindu temples in a huge warehouse in Queens, a former YMCA in New Jersey, or a former Methodist church in Minneapolis. Most of the Vietnamese Buddhist temples of Denver, Houston, and Orange County were in ranch-style homes. Because of the invisibility of these first-generation religious institutions, many Americans, understandably, have remained quite unaware of these new communities.

The past decades, however, have also seen the beginnings of a striking new visible landscape. There are new mosques and Islamic centers in Manhattan and Phoenix, rising from the cornfields outside Toledo and from the suburbs of Chicago and Houston. There are multimillion-dollar Hindu temples, like the Sri Venkateswara temple in Pittsburgh, the Bharatiya Temple in the northern suburbs of Detroit, the spectacular Sri Meenakshi Temple south of Houston, the Ganesha temple in Nashville, and dozens of others. The Buddhists have made a striking architectural imprint, with, for example, the huge Hsi Lai temple in Hacienda Heights, California, and the Jade Temple in Houston. In the western Chicago suburb of Bartlett, the Jains have built a large new temple. To the north in Palatine is a striking new hexagonal gurdwara of the Sikhs.

There are some neighborhoods where all this is visible in short compass. For example, driving out New Hampshire Avenue, one of the great spokes of Washington, D.C., into Silver Spring, Maryland, just beyond the Beltway there is a stretch of road a few miles long where one passes the new Cambodian Buddhist temple with its graceful, sloping tiled roof, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Muslim Community Center with its new copper-domed mosque. Farther along is the new Gujarati Hindu temple called Mangal Mandir. The many churches along the way also reveal the new dimensions of America's Christian landscape: Hispanic Pentecostal, Vietnamese Catholic, and Korean evangelical congregations sharing facilities with more traditional English-speaking "mainline" churches.

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