Zen Chaplaincy, Activism, and Scholarship

In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Pierce Salguero sits down with Wakoh Shannon Hickey, who is a Soto Zen priest, hospice chaplain, scholar, and activist. She talks about her early experiences with social violence in the 1980s, her work as a hospital chaplain, and her 2019 book Mind Cure, which is a groundbreaking social history of religion and mindfulness in the U.S.

Resources:

• Wakoh's Academia.edu page

• Hickey, Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine (Oxford UP, 2019)

• Helderman, Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (2019)

• Brown, Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion? (2019)

• Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (2019)

Find all episodes of the Blue Beryl Podcast here.

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. He is also the host (with Lan Li) of the Blue Beryl podcast. Subscribe to Blue Beryl here.