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ON COMMON GROUND Guide for Teachers and Students
profiled only five mosques or Islamic centers in the Chicago section, but the Regional Directory (on the Chicago router page) shows more than seventy mosques or Islamic centers in the greater Chicago area. Each city or regional map offers only a sample of that place's religious diversity, not the complete picture.
What about the places with no red buttons ? This is a challenge for you and for students and teachers in every part of the United States. Will teachers and students in Hawaii and Alaska, in Mississippi and Michigan, begin documenting our changing religious landscape? Expanding our essays and profiles to include every part of the United States requires the help of Pluralism Project affiliates like you.
What about smaller communities and new religious movements? We have not been able to include the many sects and new religious movements that have long proliferated in the United States. This is the subject of the extensive research project of J. Gordon Melton at the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, California. The publications and directories of Melton's research are available in libraries.
Introductory Essay: "New Neighbors"
The religious landscape of America is changing. A mosque rises from the cornfields along the interstate outside Toledo, Ohio. A new Hindu temple is consecrated in a suburb of Houston, on a hillside in Nashville, or a hilltop in Lemont, Illinois. Vietnamese Buddhist temples have opened in Salt Lake City and Denver; Thai Buddhist temples in Oklahoma City and Bolivia, North Carolina; Cambodian temples in Lowell, Massachusetts and Minneapolis, Minnesota. "Hillside Terrace" in Fremont, California is renamed "Gurdwara Terrace" as a spacious new Sikh gurdwara is built in the neighborhood.
In every state and major city in the U.S. there are new religious neighbors today. People of other faiths are not just metaphorical neighbors around the world, but often next-door neighbors. A Lutheran church and a Buddhist temple are right across the street from one another in Garden Grove, California. A Muslim Community Center, a Ukranian Orthodox church, a Disciples of Christ church and a Gujarati Hindu temple are virtually next-door neighbors on New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland.
In the eighteen cities and regions shown on this gateway-map of the U.S., there is a remarkable new religious diversity. In each city you will find portraits of temples and churches, mosques and gurdwaras, synagogues and interfaith councils. They are a but a sample of the wide range of religious communities that are present in these cities and regions. A more complete directory of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain temples, Islamic centers, Sikh gurdwaras, and Zoroastrian centers is available from the menu bar-not only for these eighteen cities and regions, but for every state in the U.S.
The mapping of America's new religious landscape is just beginning, as people from every state in the U.S. begin to realize just how religiously diverse we now are. In the introductions to each city, you will discover some remarkable things: that Los Angeles is the most diverse and complex Buddhist city in the world, with well over two hundred Buddhist temples; that there are nearly two dozen mosques in Houston and almost as many Hindu
