PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in Religious Thought at the University of Queensland and a renowned specialist in the nexus between religion and the history of ideas. His recent publications include Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), The Antichrist: A New Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2020), God: A New Biography (I.B. Tauris, 2018); Afterlife: A History of Life after Death (I.B. Tauris, 2016), and The Devil: A New Biography (I.B. Tauris, 2014). His earlier, pioneering book The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 1988) has gained a reputation as a landmark study in comparative religion and intellectual history.
'Philip Almond is an excellent cultural historian and his research into the early centuries of the encounter between Buddhism and the West is fascinating. There has been no single book that both gives a composite account of the life of the Buddha and narrates how the Buddha came to the West – and Almond offers us precisely this. The author's prose is accessible and engaging throughout and the breadth of his historical reading highly commendable.' Elizabeth J. Harris, President, UK Association for Buddhist Studies 'Philip Almond's The British Discovery of Buddhism (1988) was a transformative book for those of us concerned with the structure of scholarly endeavor and the sociology of knowledge in 'oriental studies.' The approach that the author takes to his new biography of the Buddha is similarly well-considered and very much in line with the best current scholarship on the topic. More and more, cultural historians are recognizing that the 'bare facts' of historical events do not best reflect the complex cultural realities of the histories as received and transmitted by actual human beings in time. An old, worn orientalist trope is that the Buddha was a 'sober-minded rationalist' whose teachings were corrupted by the delusions of Asian followers, addicted to magic and mystery. This orientalist trope is itself part of the complex of cultural imaginations of the modern West-patterns of thinking whose history was given critical attention by Almond's own ground-breaking British Discovery (mentioned above). ' Christian K. Wedemeyer, University of Chicago
