By Diana L. Eck
New York: HarperCollins, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. Hardback, xli + 404 pages.
As Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies and Director of the well-known Pluralism Project at Harvard University, Diana Eck dispensed students into countless communities scattered across the United States, where they studied our proliferating religious pluralism. These youthful researchers and their professor discovered that the United States harbors more American Muslims than American Episcopalians, Jews, or Presbyterians and that at present Los Angeles has more than three hundred Buddhist temples and the world's most varied Buddhist communities.
Eck presents this extensive diversity as a present-day Main Street phenomenon, although many Americans are unaware of this profound change. Eck depicts this submerged or concealed culture by describing Muslims worshipping in a former mattress showroom in Northridge, California, and Hindus gathering in a warehouse in Queens, New York. She identifies the growing religious diversity in America as a great challenge in the twenty-first century. Eck's study probes religious diversity in the United Stares by showing both the tragedies that develop through ignorance and misunderstanding and the hope for cultivating new spiritual communities.
-DANIEL ROSS CHANDLER
January/February 2002