John Buescher received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, concentrating on the history of religions, especially Buddhism and Christianity, and studying Asian languages. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and later a Program Officer in the Division of Education Programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1991, he left NEH to establish and head the Voice of America’s Tibetan Broadcast Service, the job he currently holds, directing the programming of four hours of daily shortwave radio news and feature broadcasts to Tibet and South Asia.
From his interest in Asian religions, he has turned
his attention to the history of American interest in Asian religions, and
so to the study of nineteenth-century Transcendentalists and Spiritualists.
His article, “More Lurid than Lucid: The Spiritualist Invention of the
Word ‘Sexism,’” appeared in the September 2002 issue of the Journal
of the American Academy of Religion. His book, The Other Side
of Salvation: Spiritualism in the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience,
has just been published by Skinner House Books. He has also recently
completed a biography of Boston reformer and spiritualist John Murray Spear.
Lincoln relics fascinate him (an investigation on this subject is linked
from this site’s “Envisioning the War” page), but so do other sacred relics—as
he describes in his essay, “The Buddha’s Conventional and Ultimate Tooth,”
in Guy Newland, ed., Changing Minds: Contributions to the Study of Buddhism
and Tibet in Honor of Jeffrey Hopkins (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 2001).
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