Sihler Lecture: Dr. Janice Willis “Black, Baptist, and Buddhist: How I Learned Non-Violent Activism”

In this talk, Professor Willis will discuss how key elements of her life story–marching with Dr. King during the Civil Rights Campaign in Birmingham in 1963, guns on campus at Cornell University in 1969, and later journeying to India and meeting Tibetan Buddhist teachers–gave her a new academic, as well as spiritual, home. Complementing the talk will be a brief PowerPoint presentation of photos from the period.

Jan Willis (BA and MA in Philosophy from Cornell University; PhD in Indic and Buddhist Studies from Columbia University) is Professor of Religion Emerita at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the U.S. for five decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism for over forty-six years. She is the author of several books and has published numerous articles and essays on various topics in Buddhism—Buddhist meditation, hagiography, women and Buddhism, and Buddhism and race. In 2000, TIME magazine named Willis one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium.” In 2003, she was a recipient of Wesleyan University’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Newsweek magazine’s “Spirituality in America” issue in 2005 included a profile of Willis and Ebony magazine in 2007 named Willis one of its “Power 150” most influential African Americans. In 2012, Jan spent seven weeks in a Buddhist nunnery in Thailand and, in 2013, she walked the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain.

This event is sponsored by Sihler Endowed Lecture, OEN Fellowship, Religion, and Identity Studies Departments.