The Irish Buddhist is the biography of a truly extraordinary Irish emigrant, sailor and migrant worker who became a Buddhist monk and anti-colonial activist in early twentieth-century Asia. Born Laurence Carroll in 1856, U Dhammaloka defied the British Empire and missionary Christianity in defense of local culture. He had five different aliases, was tried for sedition, put under police and intelligence surveillance, faked his own death, and ultimately disappeared. His dramatic life rewrites the previously accepted story of how Buddhism became a modern global religion.
Ireland and Buddhism have a long history. Shaped by colonialism, contested borders, religious wars, empire and massive diasporas, Irish people have encountered Asian Buddhism in many ways over fourteen centuries. From the thrill of travellers' tales in far-off lands to a religious alternative to Christianity, from the potential of anti-colonial solidarity to fears of 'going native', and from recent immigration to the secular spread of Buddhist meditation, Buddhism has meant many different things to people in Ireland. Knowledge of Buddhist Asia reached Ireland by the seventh century, with the first personal contact in the fourteenth - a tale remembered for five hundred years. The first Irish Buddhists appeared in the political and cultural crisis of the nineteenth century, in Dublin and the rural West, but also in Burma and Japan. Over the next hundred years, Buddhism competed with esoteric movements to become the alternative to mainstream religion. Since the 1960s, Buddhism has exploded to become Ireland's third-largest religion. Buddhism and Ireland is the first history of its subject, a rich and exciting story of extraordinary individuals and the journey of ideas across Europe and Asia.
In 1979, 24-year-old Maura O'Halloran left her waitressing job in Boston and began her study of Zen in Japan. Today she is revered as a Buddhist saint, and a statue in her honor stands at the monastery where she lived. This is the story of her journey.
One day in the summer of 2016, Michael Harding's wife brought an unusual gift home from Warsaw. All of a sudden, he found himself falling back into the old religious devotions of an earlier time. The meaning he had found through years of engagement with therapy began to dissolve. Here, in On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist, Harding examines the search for meaning in life which keeps him fastened to the idea of god. After many therapy sessions focused on an effort to uncover personal truth, and long solitary months on the road with a one man show, Harding is finally led to an artists' retreat in the shadow of Skellig Michael. Mixing stories from the road with dispatches from his Irish Times columns, On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist is a spell-binding and powerful book about the human condition, the narratives we weave around the self, and the ultimate bliss of living in the present moment. 'What happens between one story and the next? That's the really interesting part. That's the space where we find bliss; where we float sometimes, suspended, and only for a brief moment. Perhaps only for a few scarce moments in an entire life.'
At the age of 24, Maura O'Halloran travelled to Japan, where she spent three years studying Zen Buddhism. On her way back to Ireland, she was tragically killed, and is now venerated as a Buddhist saint.
What would a classroom look like if understanding and respecting differences in race, culture, beliefs, and opinions were at its heart? If you were inspired to become a teacher because you wanted to develop young minds, but now find yourself limited by "teach to the test" pressures and state standards, Mary Cowhey's book Black Ants and Buddhists: Thinking Critically and Teaching Differently in the Primary Grades will reignite the passion and remind you that educators provide more than test prep. Starting her career as a community activist, Cowhey shares her roots and how they influenced her Peace Class, where she asks her students to think critically, learn through activism and discussion, and view the entire curriculum through the framework of understanding the world, and what they can do to make it a better place. Woven through the book is Mary's unflinching and humorous account of her own roots as well as lessons from her heroes: Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King, Jr, and others. Her students learn to make connections between their lives, the books they read, the community leaders they meet, and the larger world. Black Ants and Buddhists offers no easy answers, but it does include starting points for conversations about diversity and controversy in your classroom, as well as in the larger community. Students and teachers investigate problems and issues together, in a multicultural, antiracist classroom.
This book is a general introduction to the English spoken in Ireland, its most characteristic features, and its historical development. It provides a practical introduction to the topic of Irish English (also known as Hiberno-English), the variety of English that arose in Ireland as a consequence of contact between the Irish and the English languages. As well as looking at the specific examples where substratum from Irish can be observed, the book analyses other features unique to Irish English, from different perspectives (taking into account, for example, the pragmatic implications of certain syntactic structures in current spoken Irish English). It offers the reader a comprehensive coverage of the history and most salient features of this variety of English, while discussing key concepts such as bilingualism and language shift. The material is presented in a simple and accessible manner. It encourages the reader to discuss and think critically about some of the topics and to use the last section of each chapter as a basis for further investigation. An Introduction to Irish English contains exercises and practical activities with each chapter, as well as suggestions for further reading. It deals with both real data and fictional representations of this variety and it includes excerpts from Literature, media and film scripts, as well as other contexts, including everyday conversation, political debates, newspapers, e-mail, blogs, etc.
