01/25/2026
Friend, just a quick reminder of our Global Village Peace Forum 1..
8:00pm-9:00pm (ET), Jan 28th (Wed), 2026
Zoom Meeting ID: 815 8078 8213,
Zoom Passcode: 20202050
Dr. Mark Blum is a Professor in Japanese Program and Buddhist Studies and also the Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair in Japanese Studies at The University of California, Berkeley. He received his M.A. in Japanese Literature from UCLA and his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies in 1990 from the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in Pure Land Buddhism throughout East Asia, with a focus on the Japanese medieval period. He also works in the area of Japanese Buddhist Reponses to modernism, Buddhist conceptions of death in China and Japan, historical consciousness in Buddhist thought, and the impact of the Nirvana Sutra (Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra) in East Asian Buddhism. He is the author of The Origins and Development of Pure Land Buddhism (2002), and co-editor of Rennyo and the Roots of Modern Japanese Buddhism (2005) and Cultivating Spirituality (2011), and Volume 2 of his translation from Chinese of The Nirvana Sutra should appear by the end of 2025. He is currently working on completing Think Buddha, Say Buddha: a history of nenbutsu thought, practice, and culture.
Dr David A Palmer is a Professor jointly appointed by the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, which he joined in 2008. After completing his Ph.D. at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (School for Advanced Research, Université Paris PSL), he was the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society in the Department of Sociology of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and, from 2004 to 2008, director of the Hong Kong Centre of the French School of Asian Studies (Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient), located at the Institute for Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently the President of the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Palmer’s interdisciplinary research and teaching is situated at the intersection of anthropology and sociology, and is informed by scholarly traditions in history, religious studies and Sinology. He is best known for his award-winning books The Religious Question in Modern China (Joseph Levenson Award of the Association for Asian Studies and PROSE award of the American Publishers’ Association, co-authored with V. Goossaert) and Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (Francis L.K. Hsu Award of the Society for East Asian Anthropology), both of which have become essential reading for studies on contemporary Chinese society and religion. His latest book Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (co-authored with E. Siegler) was published in 2017 by the University of Chicago Press, and in Chinese by HKU Press. He has also published numerous articles, journal issues and edited volumes on Chinese religion, civil society, Daoism, the Bahá’í Faith, and modern and transnational religious movements. His writings have been published in journals such as Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Economy and Society, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, the Journal of Asian Studies and Modern Asian Studies.
Dr. Palmer leads the “Asian Religious Connections” research cluster at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, where he leads projects on Daoism among the Yao ethnic minority in Laos, and on the cultural and religious dimensions of interactions between Chinese and local actors in countries of the Belt and Road Initiative. He is also co-convenor of the “Culture, Community and Social Equity” research cluster in the HKU Faculty of Social Sciences; and co-convenor of the HKU Anthropology Research Network.
