World's Parliament of Religions

Richard Hughes Seager is Bates and Benjamin Professor of Classical and Religious Studies at Hamilton College. He is author of Buddhism in America and Encountering the Dharma and editor of The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World's Parliament of Religions.

• Foreword by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. SteinAcknowledgmentsPreface to the Paperback ReissueIntroductionI. A Millennial City1. The Columbian Myth of America2. The Midway Plaisance and the Magic of the White CityII. An Ingathering of Nations and Tribes3. Chicago's Pentecost4. On Mars Hill5. "A Rapt Gaze into the Millennium"III. Further and Fractious Missions6. Acts of Apostles7. Beyond the White CityAfterwordNotesBibliographyIndex

"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."—H-Asia H-Net"[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."—Robert S. Ellwood, Church History"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."—Journal of American History"This volume should be read by every student of religion and ideas in Gilded Age America."—Choice"[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."—Hindu-Christian Studies Bulletin