The last time I read anything about Buddhism was probably in middle school when I still had a class called "social studies." I don't know much about it. What I do know is that Buddhists are supposed to be very peaceful, and they meditate a lot. I'm not positive, but I think they may also be the religion that talks about yin and yang. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. So, clearly, I do not know a lot. However, that only made this article all the more interesting. Oftentimes, we are stuck in our own religious worlds, and we never want to venture outside the box. We have the tendency to believe other religions are crazy and to just leave it at that. I read this article because I never really hear about the Buddhist population in the U.S. I only ever hear about Jews, Christians and Muslims. I thought I'd mix it up a little with this article.
First off, I think this story was an explanatory story. I'm definitely unsure of this evaluation, but from what I could see, there were very little quotations and a lot of explaining, which was characteristic of the example we read in class. On that note, I felt the reporter did a very good job of explaining. He gave readers a timeline of the history of Buddhism in California, which I'm sure most readers did not know about. It helped to set up why this area is such a prominent Buddhist community in the U.S.
He also discusses the role of Buddhism now in that area. Buddhists have made efforts to help others in the community. This shows readers a clearer reason why they should care. Buddhists are trying to help others in the community, and the readers could be these others, or they could at least relate to them. At any rate, it shows that Buddhists are taking an active role in society, and people would most likely respect them for doing something. Their actionsmake them relevant to the rest of the community; they are not an ancient, dead culture.
As I said before, this article was very interesting. It taught me a lot, which in my opinion, is the most important part of jounalism. We need to tell people what they don't already know. The article ends with a listing of all the places readers can visit, which was a nice touch because it allows readers a way to experience what the article just described.
I do have one complaint I found. The writer says that a tourist can find inspiration or even enlightenment by "following in the footsteps of American Buddhism." While this goes along with the overall message of the piece, I thought that was a pretty big assumption for the writer to make. I don't know if some people would find that acceptable, but I did not.
Overall, this story was definitely worth reading. It was a nice break from reading about all the violence in the Middle East.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/travel/escapes/10buddhism.html
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3 comments:
Mary Beth,
I read this article, then read your blog post and thought that you had really offered a great reading and perspective on the piece. You're right; all we ever do hear about in the news are stories of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Practically 1/5th of our world practices Hinduism and Buddhism and Americans don't seem to even know what they are.
I think this is why I wasn't too offended by Grafinkel's assertion that we could find enlightenment by "following the footsteps of American Buddhism." I read this literally, where he's saying 'Hey, be enlightened; step out of your Christian comfort zone and open your eyes to these other religious views.' Whether it's his place or not to do this is open for debate.
Mary Beth,
Notice the placement of the assertion about Buddhism and enlightenment. It is the transition sentence between the first and second part of the article. It is so tempting to proselytize in transitions. It's relatively easy and requires no sources or background information. This, however, is something to generally avoid in your own writing. Yet, Evan brings up an interesting point. Is this positive statement counterbalancing hundreds of articles about Islam, Christianity, and Judaism leading to enlightenment? No one said journalism was easy!
With the conventional notions of evidence, religion is hard to cover. It doesn't make much sense to say, "the so-called path to enlightenment" or "the so-called saviour." The the faithful, no adjective is needed.
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