The World's Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (Paperback)

Richard Hughes Seager's valuable 1995 work, now available in paperback, aims to study the 'East/West encounter' that occurred at the World's Parliament of Religions. Seager is an expert on American religious history, and the virtue of this work for students of Asian religion and history is that it enables us to locate figures like Vivekananda, Soen, Dharmapala, and Gandhi as actors in a social drama taking place in a cultural field where the most explicit issues were internal to the American religious scene.

[Though] it did have its mythic dimensions, [the Parliament] was also a flesh-and-blood occasion that influenced the course of religion in several countries. Richard Seager has done an excellent job of sorting out the myths and the realities and showing why an understanding of both is essential to a proper assessment of the Parliament.

As a glimpse of the complex problems of cultural and religious pluralism that have spawned wars and political conflict, Seager's book is a fine introduction to a continuing dilemma of the modern world.

This volume should be read by every student of religion and ideas in Gilded Age America.

[This] engrossingly written book . . . convincingly shows that the [1893] parliament marked a point of religious and cultural change in North America. . . . This book is clearly the classic work on the 1893 Parliament of Religions—one you will want to keep on your bookshelf.