Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Program Presents
Buddhism & Activism
Thursday, February 18, 2021
Online Event
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Dr. Jan Willis, Professor Emerita of Religion at Wesleyan University
Jan Willis, PhD was raised in the South during the Jim Crow era and marched with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She went on to become a distinguished scholar, author, an award-winning teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. In this talk she will discuss the many resonances she sees between key Buddhist principles and social activism.
Jan Willis is Professor Emerita of Religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Born in Docena, Alabama in 1948 and profoundly affected by the Civil Rights movement, she majored in philosophy at Cornell University and met Buddhism while traveling in Asia in the 1970s. She earned her PhD in Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the U.S. for five decades. The author of several books and numerous articles and essays on Buddhist philosophy, meditation, women and Buddhism and Buddhism and race, her memoir Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist was first published in 2001 and was re-issued in 2008 by Wisdom Publications. In December of 2000, TIME magazine named Willis one of six "spiritual innovators for the new millennium." She has been profiled in Newsweek and Ebony. Her latest book, Dharma Matters: Women, Race and Tantra; Collected Essays by Jan Willis was published in April 2020.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://bard.zoom.us/j/86771200216.
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Online Event