Dhamma Wheel Buddhist Forum

Peter wrote:"Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, & colleagues, he can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path." — SN 45.2

retrofuturist wrote: Dhamma Wheel is my community of practice.

I wouldn't be taking additional precepts today were it not for the support and encouragement of this community.

The conference will have a wide interpretation of ‘religious communication’, including, but extending religious communication beyond ‘communication studies’ understood as ‘mass media’, to include religious modes of communication such as prayer, sermons, revelation, art, theatre and ritual, as well as religious uses of mass media. We invite papers from the perspectives across the humanities and social sciences, including literature, music, performance, film and television, anthropology, sociology and history, as well as religious studies and theology. We also invite papers from all religious perspectives.

The conference is particularly interested in exploring:

Religious affect and its relationship to different media (e.g., song, prayer, architecture, film, performance, images in general)
Religious interpretation and textual hermeneutics (e.g., literalism versus symbolism)
The use of communication media and art forms by religious groups to create a sense of community
Communication as a ‘portal’ or window to the ‘divine’ and/or the ‘sacred’
Cross-cultural adaptation and the creolisation of religious forms
Religion and the sacred in popular culture
Modernity, post-modernity and religious communication.

This conference will be held immediately prior to the World Parliament of Religions, providing an opportunity for reflection on religious practice and the relationship between religious identity and the aesthetic forms of religious communication, and cross cultural communication.