A Lotus Blossoms Above Muddy Waters - a podcast by The Religion, Race and Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia

In 1905, a young Zen priest named Nyogen Senzaki arrived in San Francisco from Japan. He was convinced that America, with its long tradition of religious freedom, was fertile ground for the spread of Buddhism. And he slowly built a diverse new community of Buddhist practitioners in California. But everything changed when the U.S. entered World War II. Beginning in 1942, the United States government incarcerated roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent—including Senzaki—in remote camps across the American interior. Many were American citizens. They were held without charges, and without appeal. Duncan Ry?ken Williams, scholar and author of American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War joins us to discuss how this mass incarceration shaped American Buddhism—and American conceptions of religious freedom.

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