Pluralism Project

R. Scott Hanson joined the Pluralism Project at Harvard University in Spring 1994 after completing an M.A. in Religion at Columbia. He did much of the fieldwork in New York City for the multimedia CD-ROM On Common Ground: World Religions in America, covering the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Tibetan, Sri Lankan, and Thai Buddhist, and some Muslim communities. He is now a Project Affiliate.

Current Work

Since moving to the Philadelphia area in 2002, I have been teaching and writing about the broader history of the Mid-Atlantic region (which includes New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland)—an area that was characterized more by religious pluralism than the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony and the largely Anglican southern colonies.

There are plans to edit a new volume on religious pluralism and region, and I have been exploring the possibility of a documentary film based on City of Gods. In my free time, I have also been working on a screenplay adaptation of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.