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Neighboring Faiths. How will Americans cope with increasing religious diversity? by Diana L. Eck.

I first came to Harvard as a student of the culture and religions of India. I was fascinated by India's many religious traditions-the interrelations, tensions, and movements of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, and Sikh traditions over many centuries in a complex culture. But never did I imagine as I began teaching here in the late 1970s that the very interests that drew me to India would lead me in the 1990s to the study of the United States. So how is it that a scholar of comparative religion and Indian studies has spent the past five years studying America-furtively at first, fearful to be treading on the territory of some of Harvard's most distinguished scholars, then unapologetically, flagrantly, even zealously?

That intellectual passage from India to America began here at Harvard. The circumstances that drove me to study America raise important issues-for Harvard, for the United States, and perhaps for the world. They are issues all of us will encounter in a world shaped by a new geopolitical and a new "georeligious" reality.

For me, this journey began in the academic year 1989-90. Suddenly the contextual ground under my own feet as a scholar and teacher began to shift. In the past, I had always had several students from India in my classes on India, but in that year, their numbers increased. Only now, they were not from India, but were Indian Americans, born and raised in San Antonio, Baltimore, or Cleveland. They were, as I discovered, the children of the first generation of immigrants who had settled in America after the passage of the 1965 immigration act. That historic event finally removed the legal legacy of racism that had been built into immigration legislation from the first Chinese exclusion act in 1882 to the Johnson Reed Act in 1924, which effectively barred Asian immigrants for four decades. The 1965 policy opened the door again for immigration from Asia and from other parts of the world.
There were Muslims from Providence, Hindus from Baltimore, Sikhs from Chicago, Jains from New Jersey. They represented the emergence in America of a new cultural and religious reality.
As a scholar of India, I had taken note of the effects of the new immigration on that country, the so-called "brain drain," as thousands of Indian professionals, doctors, and scientists left India for the United States. I have to admit, however, that I had never stopped to think what this would mean for the United States until the children of this first generation of Indian immigrants reached college age and enrolled in my classes at Harvard that year. There were Muslims from Providence, Hindus from Baltimore, Sikhs from Chicago, Jains from New Jersey. They represented the emergence in America of a new cultural and religious reality.

Some came from very secular families and knew little of their Indian heritage. Others had grown up in the new Hindu or Muslim culture of temples and Islamic centers their parents had begun to establish here in the United States. Some had been to Muslim youth leadership camps, organized by the Islamic Society of North America. Some had been to a Hindu summer camp at Rajarajeswari Pitha in the Poconos, or to a family Vedanta camp at Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. Some were involved as founding members of the Jain Youth of North America. Straddling two worlds, critically appropriating two cultures, they lived in perpetual inner dialogue between the distinctive cultures of their parents and grandparents and the forceful, multiple currents of American culture. In their own struggles with identity lay the very issues that were beginning to torment the soul of the United States.

The new questions that arose were not only those that underlay the foreign cultures requirement of the Core Curriculum-how we might understand some "other" civilization so different from our own. Other questions pushed themselves to the fore: what does it mean to speak of "our own" culture? Who do "we" mean when we say "we?" How are "difference" and "otherness" defined, and by whom? The word "multicultural" signaled the fact that every dimension of American culture had become more complex. Racial issues became multisided, with Hispanic and Latino, Korean and Filipino, Chinese and Indian perspectives. Religious diversity shattered the paradigm of an America the sociologist Will Herberg had confidently described as a "three religion country"-Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. By the 1990s, there were Hindus and Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains. There were more Muslims than Episcopalians, more Muslims than Presbyterians, perhaps soon more Muslims than Jews.

The sons and daughters of the first generation from South Asia rose at Harvard to become some 5 percent of the Harvard undergraduate population. In the spring of 1993, when that first class graduated, I slipped into the balcony at Memorial Church for the Baccalaureate service and sat with the families of Mukesh Prasad and Maitri Chowdhury, the first marshals of the Harvard and Radcliffe graduating classes that year-both Hindus. Maitri recited a hymn from the Rig-Veda in ancient Sanskrit. It was a new Harvard. It had happened in four years.

The Puritans founded Harvard College to provide an educated Christian ministry for the churches. Before Judah Monis, a Sephardic Jew, was hired to teach Hebrew in 1722, he publically converted to Christianity. But both Judah Monis and Cotton Mather would be astounded at Harvard in the 1990s-its Chinese and Korean Christian fellowships, its diverse and vibrant Jewish community, its rapidly growing Islamic Society. In December 1994, the newly founded Harvard Buddhist Community observed the Buddha's Enlightenment Day for the first time ever at Harvard. There in the Divinity School's Braun Room, beneath the august portraits of a long lineage of divinity deans, some 50 Harvard students from a dozen Buddhist lineages sat on rows of square zabutons, listening to Pali, Tibetan, and Vietnamese chanting and rising, one by one, to make offerings of incense.

What has happened at Harvard has happened at major universities throughout the country. In the 1990s, universities have become the microcosms and laboratories of a new multicultural and multireligious America. It is not uncommon to have Hindu and Jew, Muslim and Christian in a single rooming group. These changes in university demographics have come not from abroad, but from the rapidly changing cultural and religious landscape of the United States. Harvard's issues, America's issues, have become, increasingly, a fresh recasting of many of India's issues, the world's issues: race, culture, religion, difference, diversity, and whether it is possible to move from diversity to pluralism.

I knew in 1990 that my own teaching context had radically changed and the scope of my academic work would have to change, too. Increasingly, it became clear to me that the very shape of traditional fields of study was inadequate to this new world. In my field, those of us who study Buddhism, Islam, or Hinduism all earn our academic stripes, so to speak, by intensive study in Japan, Egypt, or India, doing language studies, textual editions and translations, fieldwork. And those who study religion in America focus largely on the Protestant mainstream, or perhaps on Catholics, or American Judaism-but not on American Buddhism, not on the Muslims of America, not on the Sikhs of America. And those historians who focus their work on what has become known as ethnic studies are curiously silent about the religious traditions of America's ethnic minorities-the old Islamic traditions of the African slaves, the old Chinese temples in Montana and Idaho, or the early Sikh communities in California's Imperial Valley.

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