As Southeast Community
College’s resident expert in Buddhist Studies, Dr. Courtney Bruntz recently
wrote a chapter in the newly-published Buddhism
Under Capitalism, an academic book published on Nov. 3, 2022.
“I am a scholar of
Buddhist Studies, specifically contemporary Chinese Buddhism, and I am
particularly interested in how Buddhist practice is shaped by socioeconomic
contexts, plus how Buddhists are agentive in altering their surrounding
societies,” Bruntz explained.
Bruntz is an Associate Dean of Arts & Sciences at SCC with an
extensive background in Asian Studies. During college,
she studied abroad in Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Religious
Studies in Speech Communications, she went on to earn a master’s degree in
Cultural and Historical Studies of Religion, and a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies.
In her contributing chapter in Buddhism Under Capitalism, she focuses
on the research between religious traditions being entrenched in their
surrounding socioeconomic and cultural settings. The book has 11 chapters with
15 different authors.
“For this particular project, I revealed the ways that Buddhists
are contributing to technological advancements in China and Japan and how they
are making use of robots and artificial intelligence to meet the needs of
practitioners.”
This work is the result of an academic seminar titled “Economics
and Capitalism in the Study of Buddhism,” which ran annually from 2015 to 2019
at the American Academy of Religion meeting. From presentations at this
seminar, scholars edited their work to produce this volume, which was proposed
to Bloomsbury for publication.
Prior
to this, Dr. Bruntz published Buddhist
Tourism in Asia in 2020. Coming up next, she is co-editor
of the Oxford Handbook of Lived Buddhism, which will be published in
2024.
Her
current publication can be found at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/buddhism-under-capitalism-9781350228337/
For
more on Dr. Courtney Bruntz, click on her bio: https://www.southeast.edu/news_stories/new_associate_dean_of_arts___sciences/