Other Religions: The Jewish Final Frontier?
by Matt Ponak
I started the first year of my Master’s degree in August of 2010 at Naropa University. A private school in Boulder, Colorado, Naropa is the only fully accredited Buddhist post-secondary institution in the United States. I enrolled in Naropa's Contemplative Religions program because I wanted to learn more about world religions from an Eastern lens.
Naropa offers a variety of graduate and undergraduate degrees. These include Contemplative Psychology, Religious Studies--both World Religions and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism--Environmental Leadership, and Writing and Poetics. Naropa specializes in Contemplative Education, a mode of teaching that aims to have students incorporate what they learn in class into deeper parts of who they are.
When I moved from my home in Calgary, Canada, to Boulder, I thought that I was making a unique life choice. Raised in a culturally Jewish, secular, Conservative...