The Annual Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies: Concurrent with American Academy of Religions Annual Meeting Boston, November 2017

Learning from Muslims, Thinking about Anger, and Enjoying Fo Guang Shan's Hospitality

Four highlights of this year's annual SBCS meeting were the Friday evening session "What Buddhists and Christians Can Learn from Muslims," our visit to Fo Guang Shan's Cambridge temple that evening, the Saturday morning session "Uses and Misuses of Anger in Buddhism and Christianity," and, immediately afterward, the election of Leo Lefebure (Georgetown) as our new vice president, and John Makransky's handing over the presidency to current vice president Kristin Largen. The SBCS vice president is in charge of planning the sessions at our annual meeting and—after two years—takes over as president. Each year the SBCS, a "Related Scholarly Organization" of the American Academy of Religion, holds our annual meeting concurrently with AAR's annual meeting.

Friday Board of Directors' Meeting

Officers' Reports

After President John Makransky called the meeting to order at 9 a.m., the board approved the proposed agenda and then last year's minutes and the treasurer's report.

Journal Co-editor Thomas Cattoi reported that the 2019 volume of the Journal will publish the papers from the 2017 conference in Pistoia, Italy, which honored the scholarly work of seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, most notably his writings about Tibet. Noting that not all the papers submitted for publication are in his and Co-editor Carol Anderson's areas of specialization, he asked that the Society's board members, the Journal's editorial board members, and others who are asked to peer-review papers, respond in a timely manner. Sid Brown, book review Editor, asked to be alerted about books that should be reviewed. Journal Co-editor Carol Anderson thanked her for her consistently timely and careful contributions to the Journal. Newsletter Editor Jonathan Seitz reminded us that it's now being published only online. He asked board members to submit articles and to remind colleagues and students to do so as well.

International Advisor Report

Elizabeth Harris reported on the plans for the European Network for Buddhist-Christian Studies' conference June 27–July 1, 2019 at St. Ottilien Monastery in Emming, Germany, near Munich. It will honor the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Lynn de Silva, the Sri Lankan Methodist theologian and leader in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. The theme will be considering the future of Buddhist-Christian dialogue in the light of five major emphases in de Silva's work. The first paper will be presented by Wesley Ariarajah, emeritus professor of ecumenical theology at Drew who, like de Silva, was ordained in the Sri Lankan Methodist Church and who has contributed greatly to interfaith dialogue and Christian ecumenism globally. The call for papers will probably close the end of February 2019.

Committee Reports

Social media committee chairperson Judith Simmer-Brown first reported that the new website has been up and running for a year and a half. She explained that renewing Society membership through the new GoPaywall membership service involves first creating a "membership portal" with a credit card number and password, and then actually renewing one's membership. GoPaywall will automatically renew one's membership yearly after that, but will send a notice first. She noted that the new system can produce a tax receipt at any time.

After passing out the web analytics, she pointed out we now have fifteen new members since switching to GoPaywall. This gives us a total of 145 members, double the number we had this time last year! Clearly the new website is helping us reach a larger audience and draw them into our conversations. Alicia Brown was appointed to take over the weekly website tasks that social media committee member Ayo Yetunde had been doing.

Blog Co-director Abraham Velez announced that the blog is live, noting how help ful Alicia Brown has been with this. He reported that he and blog Co-director Karen Enriquez have come up with four tabs: Teaching Materials—which Karen will moderate; News—which Jonathan Seitz will moderate; Books...