The World's Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893

Richard Hughes Seager's The World's Parliament of Religions, The East, West Encounter, Chicago 1893, published by Indiana University Press in 1995, is a scholarly study of the landmark 1893 gathering in Chicago that brought representatives of the world's religious traditions together in an unprecedented public forum, including Swami Vivekananda's famous address, and examines the event's lasting influence on American religious pluralism. Seager is a scholar of American religious history. Its strength is that it treats the Parliament both as a specific historical event and as a case study in how nineteenth century Americans encountered non-Christian traditions on a public stage. Its limit is that the Parliament's own organizers worked within their own period's assumptions about religious hierarchy and comparison, a framing Seager's study discusses but which a reader should keep distinct from how the traditions themselves would describe their own place in the event.