Congratulations to Religious Studies PhD student Christopher Emory-Moore on winning the 2017-2018 PhD Graduate Award for the CSSR Essay Contest! His essay was on “Present Peace, Future Freedom: Children’s Meditation Instruction in Two Diasporic Tibetan Buddhist Lineages”
"A sophisticated, compelling, and innovative examination of two children’s meditation manuals produced by divergent Buddhist organizations. The comparison is effected to make a larger argument about the interplay of ‘traditional’ and ‘modernist’ discourses in the self-ascriptions, strategic adaptations, and contemporary visions of diasporic Buddhist groups. The paper makes careful note of the incongruences the deployment of these discourses engender, tracking large scale shifts in the educational pedagogies of young Buddhists as well as more finely grained variances between sectarian approaches to secularism, ecumenism, therapeutics and soteriology. Moving smoothly between the minutiae of meditation manuals and the scholarly debates about modernist and traditional categorization, the author recommends a new conceptual apparatus of ‘adaptationism’, using the children’s meditation manuals to illustrate how this refinement would be profitable. The paper’s stellar organization and writing style enhance the arguments immensely." - Canadian Society for the Study of Religion
The CSSR is accepting submissions for the 2018-2019 essay contest until April 20.