Thomas David DuBois

As religions go, Buddhism can be pretty hard to grab hold of.

Ask two Buddhists what they believe, and you won't just get two different answers -- you might get three or four. On the one hand, the sheer size and diversity of the Buddhist tradition makes it impossible...

Usually we know where to look for answers. You know where to go for the weather forecast, and who to call when your car won't start. If you need to find something more esoteric--who fought the War of the Spanish Succession, or what is the main export of Bangladesh--there's always...

Having spent the past 10 years writing and teaching on Asian religions, I now have something to confess:

Asia does not have religion.

"But what," you may ask, "about that college class I took on 'world religions?' We learned about Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism and Shinto. Half the class was about...

Chinese religious life revolves around a calendar of festivals. Some festivals are celebrated by the family, but others draw together the entire community.

These two videos were taken at the festival of the goddess Mazu in Leizhou, at the very southern tip of the Chinese mainland. Mazu is a patron...

Having spent most of the past decade outside the United States, it is easy for me to fall behind the curve on American popular culture. Usually this doesn't feel like much of a hardship. I can't name a single American Idol, and yet somehow still find the strength to face...

Freedom from state-established religion is among the most cherished of American values. Yet the promotion of religious freedom abroad as an element of American diplomacy is relatively new. It was only with the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, and subsequent publication of the first Annual...

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." --Orson Welles

As we have all heard by now, American preacher Harold Camping predicted that the end would come on May 21. In his version, the end would begin with the Rapture, in which...

China is again in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Highlighted by the detention of artist Ai Weiwei and Nobel-laureate Liu Xiaobo, the past few months have seen what Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner recently called a "serious backsliding" of human rights.
Even with China's growing...