Buddhism and Ireland - From the Celts to the Counter-Culture and Beyond - Laurence Cox
6. The Founders: Social Movements, Counter-Culture and the Crumbling of Catholic Hegemony
Buddhism and Ireland - From the Celts to the Counter-Culture and Beyond - Laurence Cox
Laurence Cox [+]
National University of Ireland
Laurence Cox is Director of the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He is co-editor of Ireland’s New Religious Movements (CSP, 2011), Understanding European Movements (Routledge, 2013) and Marxism and Social Movements (Brill, 2013), and a practising Buddhist.
Description
The period from the late 1960s to the early 1990s laid the foundations for contemporary Buddhism in Ireland. Irish religion being primarily a matter of ethnic identity, community membership and political orientation, Irish Buddhism was shaped by this: part of countercultural formations in the 1960s as in the 1890s, it was shaped by anti-colonial nationalisms, resistance to capitalist modernization and challenges to taken-for-granted gender relations. Individual participants risked the loss of secure career paths and stepped outside safe family structures.