Contemporary relationships are in a state of rapid evolution. These changes can and should empower people with the opportunity to develop partnerships based on their own sexualities, understandings, and agreements. This makes it possible to create what Kenneth Haslam, founder of the Kinsey Institute’s Polyamory Archive, has called “designer relationships.”Designer relationships may encompass: people who bond emotionally but not sexually; people who agree to be non-exclusive; single...

Most of us long for intimate relationships, and though texting and emailing may keep us superficially connected, it ultimately cannot create the kind of intimacy necessary to sustain a deep, fulfilling, and lasting partnership. With the divorce rate reaching a staggering 50 percent in 2013 and the breakup rate among unmarried long-term couples even higher, it appears that the more we tweet, the more disconnected we become. So many of us believe that new is better, hotter, and more intense,...

The Tai Lue of Sipsong Panna, located in China’s southern Yunnan province, is the largest community of Theravada Buddhists in a country where the Mahayana tradition is dominant. In recent decades, and in light of ever-increasing global connectivity and visibility online, the public participation of Tai Lue novices and monks in practices such as eating in the afternoon, drinking alcohol, having girlfriends, and competing in sports—all considered unfitting, even unacceptable, behavior for Bu...

In Literature for Little Bodhisattvas, Natasha Heller makes two key interventions: first, she argues that picturebooks are a new genre of Buddhist writing, and second, she calls attention to an emergent family Buddhism in Taiwan that fashions children as religious subjects through shared attention with adult readers.Surveying Taiwanese Buddhism from the ground up, Heller explores the changing family dynamics that have made children into a crucial audience for Buddhist educ...

Around the first century BCE, Buddhist monks formed monasteries and established relationships with kings and lay people. The rules monks live by, the Vinaya, are a pivotal source of meaning for them and their dealings with society and form the basis of multiple monasticisms across geographical regions and throughout history. The ways in which the Vinaya is understood and practiced, therefore, must take into account the kind of monasticism that emerges from it. In Living with the Vinaya...

Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese Buddhism is death. For that reason, Japanese Buddhism’s social and economic base has long been in mortuary services—a base now threatened by public debate over the status, treatment, and location of the dead. Bonds of the Dead explores the crisis brought on by this debate and investigates what changing burial forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perce...

Southeast China is a traditional stronghold of Buddhism, but little scholarly attention has been paid to this fact. Brian Nichols’s pioneering book, Lotus Blossoms and Purple Clouds, centers on a large Buddhist monastery in Quanzhou and combines ethnographic detail with stimulating analysis to examine religion in post-Mao China. Nichols conducted more than twenty-six months of field research over a fourteen-year period (2005–2019) to develop a re-description of Chinese monastic Bu...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2021, held in September 2021. Due to COVID-10 pandemic the conference was held virtually.The 10 full papers, 3 short papers and 13 other papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. TPDL 2021 attempts to facilitate establishing connections and convergences between diverse research communities such as Digital Humanities, Informati...

This innovative collaborative work—the first to focus on Buddhist tourism—explores how Buddhists, government organizations, business corporations, and individuals in Asia participate in re-imaginings of Buddhism through tourism. Contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history examine sacred places and religious monuments as they have been shaped and reshaped by socioeconomic and cultural trends in the region.Following an introduction that offers the first theoret...

Most studies of Buddhist communities tend to be limited to villages, individual temple communities, or a single national community. Buddhist monastics, however, cross a number of these different framings: They are part of local communities, are governed through national legal frameworks, and participate in both national and transnational Buddhist networks. Educating Monks makes visible the ways Buddhist communities are shaped by all of the above—collectively and often simultaneous...

This book introduces contemporary Buddhists from across Asia and from various walks of life. Eschewing traditional hagiographies, the editors have collected sixty-six profiles of individuals who would be excluded from most Buddhist histories and ethnographies. In addition to monks and nuns, readers will encounter artists, psychologists, social workers, part-time priests, healers, and librarians as well as charlatans, hucksters, profiteers, and rabble-rousers—all whose lives reflect changes...

A young Polish/ American who grows up in New Jersey, becomes a soccer phenomenon from a young age of five. He excels in the sport and excels in languages and studies all the way through his high school year. His final game of the season a Italian scout from the Italian series A team Inter Milan, comes to watch him play at his high school to see what all the hype is about this superstar player. He is given the opportunity after graduation to fly to Milan and tryout for the team and the rest...