Rev. Danny Fisher

For more about the Shinran Shonin statue at the New York Buddhist Church, check out my past post on the object.

Also, over at Barbara’s Buddhism Blog, the author mulls over different takes on “Buddhism and the Bomb.”

In addition, the Agence France-Presse reports on how a “nuke-free world [is being] urged on [this] Hiroshima anniversary.”

Over at Angry Asian Buddhist, Arun offers a short list of positions one must hold if they claim that “Buddhism is not a religion.” Good stuff–check it out.

This from the U.S. Campaign for Burma:

Dear Ambassador Susan Rice and Ambassador John Sawers,

I am joining this petition since you serve as Presidents of the United Nations Security Council in August and September, 2009, urging you to support Desmond Tutu’s call for a UN Security Council Commission of Inquiry and a global arms embargo on Burma.

Desmond Tutu is not the only person to make this call. 55 members of Congress and 60 members of the British parliament have urged the same action. At the same time, a new report by Harvard Law School, commissioned by five of the world’s leading judges, calls for immediate action on crimes against humanity in Burma. The UN human rights representative to Burma, Paulo Pinheiro, said the same thing in a New York Times op-ed.

The scale and severity of crimes committed by Than Shwe’s regime is shocking — as many villages destroyed as in Darfur, tens of thousands of child soldiers, wide-spread use of modern-day slave labor, and widespread rape of ethnic minority women. The fact that many countries have turned a blind eye to these abuses recalls the awful days of indifference to similar abuses in Rwanda and Darfur. Scarcely a country has even mentioned these vast crimes at the U.N. Security Council.

We urge you to seize this moment to immediately propose and build support for a binding U.N. Security Council resolution on these matters. The longer we wait, the more people will die.

Add your name to the petition here.

Via Go Beyond Words: Wisdom Publications’ Buddhist Blog: The Venerable Lama Pema Wandak, director of the Palden Sakya Centers and the Vikramasila Foundation, was recently chosen by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations (NECO) to receive an Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

He is the first Tibetan to receive this award, which ranks among this country’s most prestigious and is officially recognized by both the US Senate and the US House of Representatives.