Rev. Danny Fisher

(L-R) The author and Charles S. Prebish at Moscone Center West, San Francisco, CA, for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, November 21st, 2011. Photo by Bill Aiken of SGI-USA.

I’ve got a review of Charles S. Prebish’s An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer in the latest issue of The Journal of Global Buddhism. I hope you’ll take a look here.

I’ve blogged before in the past about my friend and inspiration Charles S. Prebish, with whom I am pictured above. As I’ve said before: “A great scholar and man, I can honestly say that he’s been as important to me personally as intellectually. Quite a guy, my friend Chuck.”

In addition to the review and what I’ve written here about Chuck, I also interviewed he and John Harding about the late Leslie Kawamura for Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly Online a while back. Not long ago, I did a roundtable conversation with Chuck, my buddy Justin Whitaker and Sarah Haynes for Ted Meissner’s The Secular Buddhist Podcast as well. I hope you’ll take a look and give a listen, respectively, to those too.

I’m very pleased to tell you that I’ll be a keynote speaker at this weekend’s winter conference of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. I’ll be speaking on social justice as it relates to both Humanistic Psychology and Buddhism. If I can make a recording easily, I may post it here in the future.

Find out more about the AHP here.

“Gays and lesbians march with several groups in the 2010 Westminster Tet Parade.” Photo by Mindy Schauer for the OC Register.

Over at my Patheos blog Off the Cushion last week I posted a copy of an open letter I wrote to Mr. Neil Nguyen and the Little Saigon 2013 Tet Parade Committee in response to the committee denying the Partnership of Viet Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Organizations’ request to march in the 2013 Tet Parade. (You can read more about this story in the pages of the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times.) The post and my letter are here.

I’m sad to say that the 2013 Tet Parade proceeded without the participation of the Partnership of Viet Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Organizations. I very much appreciate Tricycle: The Buddhist Review giving this letter and the cause a push at their blog, however. Thanks, Trike! Y’all rock.

To see other letters of support — from a number of people an organizations, including the local chapters of Lambda Legal and the ACLU, as well as the Claremont School of Theology’s Center for Gender, Sexuality and Religion –  you can download a full dossier here.

And, again, my letter can be found by following this link.

(L-R) Bernie Glassman, Jeff Bridges, and the author at the Aratani Japan America Theater, Los Angeles, CA, on January 10, 2013. Photo by Gary Leonard for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

So I had a pretty amazing evening two weeks ago: I was honored to serve as moderator for an event with Academy Award-winning actor Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski, True Grit, Tron) and Zen master Bernie Glassman for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’ [ALOUD] series.

It was a joyful, hilarious, warm, and often profound experience for me — not only getting to hang out with Bernie and Jeff, but also working with the amazing folks at [ALOUD].

I’m pleased to tell you that “An Evening with Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman” has been captured in podcast form, as well as on video (watch below).

In addition, you can see images of the event taken by [ALOUD]‘s amazing photographer Gary Leonard on Flickr here. John Lucas took shots of the after-party — which included guests such as Moby, Michael C. Hall, and Shepard Fairey — that you can see here. (I only got to talk to Fairey, who was a super-cool and super-nice guy. I was happy that I got to tell him how much I love his portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as well as his poster for Luc Besson’s The Lady.)

Both the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Magazine covered the event as well. My student, good pal, and fellow Buddhoblogger Monica Sanford (who attended) also wrote about it at her wonderful blog Dharma Cowgirl.

Above all else, though, don’t miss The Dude and the Zen Master — the book that Bernie and Jeff were promoting! You can order your copy at Amazon.com.

The Buddhist Delegation (with representatives from the White House and Hindu American Seva Charities) at the First Dharmic Religious Leaders Conference at the White House, Washington, D.C., April 20, 2012. (The author is in the back row, second from the left.) Photo by Phil Rosenberg of SGI-USA.

My friend Joshua Eaton has a new article up over at The Huffington Post, entitled “Minority Religions Absent at Obama’s Inaugural Prayer Service”. I’m quoted in it alongside some admirable thinkers and leaders. As with his other work, you don’t want to miss this piece by Joshua. I hope you’ll take a look. You can read the whole article here.

Joshua is, of course, the editor, writer, and translator who founded the visionary Dana Wiki (www.danawiki.org) — an online resource meant to aid Buddhist Americans in community service work. A graduate of the Master of Divinity in Buddhist Studies program at the Harvard Divinity School, he also served as editor-in-chief of Cult/ure: The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School during his time at the institution. Today, among other things, he is a contributing scholar at the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue’s State of Formation. Joshua is also an active, must-follow Twitterer @joshua_eaton.

I’ve also interviewed Joshua twice — once for Shambhala Sun Space, and once for my Patheos blog Off the Cushion.

In addition, Joshua and I collaborated last year on an open letter from Buddhist teachers and scholars and others on Islamophobia at buddhistletteronislamophobia.wordpress.com. He authored the letter — though a few of us offered little tweaks and edits — and I put together the website and helped him get the word out and generate signatures.