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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: A.J. Jacobs

The rejection of righteous anger

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Early and Theravāda, Friends, Karmic Redirection, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Patient Endurance, Politics

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

A.J. Jacobs, autobiography, David Chapman, Dean Esmay, Dhammapāda, Disengaged Buddhism, George W. Bush, Jack Layton, justice, Śāntideva, Thich Nhat Hanh

Last time I began to propose an answer to David Chapman’s questions about what might be distinctively Buddhist about a modern Buddhist ethics. I mentioned the classical Buddhist critique of politics and activism, and noted that I agree with some of that critique. Let me now say more about what I mean by that.

What first excited me about Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra was not the widely read eighth chapter (with its meditations on self and other and the deconstruction of the body that repulses many). Rather, it was the sixth chapter, on anger and patient endurance – when I responded to a student’s question about the text by saying “in this text, there’s no such thing as righteous anger.”

I do not think this is a message a typical secular North American liberal is likely to accept. Continue reading →

What I learned teaching Abrahamic monotheism

19 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Deity, Judaism, Rites, Supernatural

≈ 65 Comments

Tags

A.J. Jacobs, academia, atheism, autobiography, Christopher Hitchens, Hebrew Bible, Mao Zedong, pedagogy, Richard Dawkins, Richard Swinburne, Stonehill College, theodicy

I started writing this blog while I was teaching at Stonehill College, which hired me for a one-year visiting position and took me on shortly after that. A Catholic school, Stonehill requires all its students to take an introductory course in religion, and a third-year course in “moral inquiry”; faculty learn rapidly that these are the bread and butter of their teaching. In my time at Stonehill I taught one elective in Hindu tradition; the other eleven course sections were all the religion requirements.

Teaching students who did not want to be there was not always a joy. The wonderful advantage of teaching Stonehill’s required courses, though, was that there was almost no restriction on content. My love of big cross-cultural questions does not play well with the specialization taught in grad school and encouraged in academic publishing, where one must learn one thing and nothing else. But I could design these courses the way I wanted. The religion department had decided it wanted one common reference point that upper-year students could turn back to, and it had decided on the book of Exodus. But as long as you taught Exodus, the rest of the course was all up to you.

And so one semester I decided I wanted to learn more about Western monotheisms, and entitled my intro religion course “God in the West.” All that Buddhism and “Hinduism” I’d studied in grad school – never mind that. Because that was stuff I already knew pretty well. One of the things I hoped to impart to my students was a love of learning; and so I decided I would teach them a subject I wanted to learn about myself.

And learn I did. Continue reading →

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