Wedged into a recliner in the corner of her assisted living apartment in Portland, Skylar Freimann, who has a terminal heart condition and pulmonary illness, anxiously eyed her newly arrived hospital bed on a recent day and worried over how she would maintain independence as she further loses mobility.

There to guide her along the journey was the Rev. Jo Laurence, a hospice and palliative care chaplain. But rather than invoking God or a Christian prayer, she talked of meditation, chanting and other Eastern spiritual traditions: “The body can weigh us down sometimes,” she counseled. “Where is the divine or the sacred in your decline?”

An ordained Sufi minister and practicing Zen Buddhist who brings years of meditation practice and scriptural training to support end-of-life patients, Laurence is part of a burgeoning generation of Buddhist chaplains who are increasingly common in hospitals, hospices and prisons, where the need for their services rose dramatically during the pandemic.

In a profession long dominated in the U.S. by Christian clergy, Buddhists are leading an ever more diverse field that includes Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan and even secular humanist chaplains. Buddhist chaplains say they’re uniquely positioned for the times due to their ability to appeal to a broad cultural and religious spectrum, including the growing number of Americans — roughly one-third — who identify as nonreligious.

In response, study and training opportunities have been established or expanded in recent years. They include the Buddhist Ministry Initiative at Harvard Divinity School and the Buddhism track at Union Theological Seminary, an ecumenical Christian liberal seminary in New York City. Colorado’s Naropa University, a Buddhist-inspired liberal arts college, recently launched a low-residency hybrid degree chaplaincy program. Nonaccredited certifications such as those offered by the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care or the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, are also popular.

“The programs keep expanding, so it seems clear that there’s a growing demand from students. And the students appear to be finding jobs after graduation,” said Monica Sanford, assistant dean for Multireligious Ministry at Harvard Divinity School and an ordained Buddhist minister.

In the past, Buddhist chaplains were often hired by the likes of hospitals and police departments specifically to minister to Asian immigrant communities. During World War II, they served Japanese American soldiers in the military. Today, however, they are more mainstream.

In a first-of-its-kind report published this month, Sanford and a colleague identified 425 chaplains in the United States, Canada and Mexico representing all major branches of Buddhism, though the researchers say there are likely many more. More than 40% work in health care, the Mapping Buddhist Chaplains in North America report found, while others serve in schools, in prisons or as self-employed counselors.

Two-thirds of respondents reported holding a Master of Divinity, another graduate degree or a chaplaincy certificate. Most of those working as staff chaplains also completed clinical pastoral education internships and residencies in health care and other settings.

Maitripa College, a Tibetan Buddhist college also in Portland, has seen increased interest in its Master of Divinity track since its launch 10 years ago, said Leigh Miller, director of academic and public programs. It appeals to a broad range, from older Buddhists with 20 years of practice to new college graduates who just started meditating, from spiritual seekers to people with multiple religious belongings.

Hospitals and other institutions are eager to hire Buddhist chaplains, Miller said, in part to boost staff diversity and also because they are adept at relating to others using inclusive, neutral language.

“Buddhist chaplains are in the habit of speaking in more universal terms, focusing on compassion, being grounded, feeling at peace,” she said. “A lot of Christian chaplains fall back on God language, leading prayers or reading Bible scriptures.”

Meanwhile, training in mindfulness and meditation, as well as beliefs regarding the nature of self, reality and the impermanence of suffering, give Buddhists unique tools to confront pain and death.

“The fruit of those hours on the (meditation) cushion really shows up in the ability to be present, to drop one’s own personal agenda and to have a kind of awareness of self and other that allows for an interdependent relationship to arise,” Miller said.

Buddhist chaplaincy also faces challenges, including how to become more accessible to Buddhists of color. The Mapping Buddhist Chaplains in North America report found that most professional Buddhist chaplains today are white and have a Christian family background, even though nearly two-thirds of the faith’s followers in the U.S. are Asian American, according to the Pew Research Center.

Traditional Buddhist communities tend to be small and run by volunteers, so they often lack the resources to offer endorsements to chaplains — a necessary step for board certification, which is often required for employment.

And non-Christian chaplains can struggle with feelings of isolation and a need to code-switch in Christian-founded health care institutions where crosses hang on walls, prayers are offered at staff meetings and Jesus and the Bible are regularly invoked.

Providence Health & Services, a Catholic nonprofit based in Washington state that runs hospitals in seven Western states, is one Christian health care system seeking to change that.

Mark Thomas, a chief mission officer in Oregon, said the system employs 10 Buddhist chaplains not despite but precisely because of its Catholic identity. The aim is to ensure patients get good spiritual care however it best suits them.

“Many patients resonate with some aspect or even just a perception of Buddhism,” said Thomas, citing practices like meditation and breathing that can help them cope with suffering. “These tools have been enormously valuable.”

Laurence, the hospice chaplain at Portland’s Providence Home and Community Services, grew up in London and felt called to Buddhism after witnessing poverty, violence and racism as a caregiver in Mississippi.

She said that as more people become unchurched, many patients don’t have a language for their spirituality, or it’s tied up with religious trauma. Laurence supports them in whatever way they need, be it through Christian prayer, the comfort of a cool washcloth on a forehead or a Buddhist-inspired blessing.

“For some people the language of Buddhism is a respite,” she said. “It doesn’t have the baggage, and it feels so soothing to them.”

Freimann, her patient, said she has practiced Eastern spiritual traditions and therefore was delighted to receive Laurence.

“I don’t think of God the way traditionally religious people do,” Freimann told her during the visit. “What a joy you’re here. … It would be so much harder to talk with a Christian chaplain.”
…

Law enforcement officials in the northeastern U.S. city of Buffalo, New York, worked Sunday to piece together the background of the teenage gunman who opened fire in a grocery store, killing 10 people and wounding three in what authorities described as “racially motivated violent extremism.”

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told CBS’s “Face the Nation” show that police “are going through every element, every detail in this shooter’s background to piece together why this happened, how this happened, and the reason that this person came to the city of Buffalo to perpetrate this horrific crime.”

U.S. President Joe Biden said the Justice Department is investigating the shooting as a hate crime, adding, “We must all work together to address the hate that remains a stain on the soul of America.”

The shooter was identified as Payton Gendron, of Conklin, a New York state community about 320 kilometers southeast of Buffalo. He is white and 11 of the 13 shooting victims were Black.

Authorities say he carried out the mayhem mid-Saturday afternoon while wearing military gear and livestreaming it with a helmet camera. He eventually dropped his weapon and surrendered to police inside the Tops Friendly Market, located in a predominantly Black neighborhood in the city of 278,000 people.

“We are certainly saddened that someone drove from hundreds of miles away, someone not from this community that did not know this community that came here to take as many Black lives as possible, who did this in a willful, premeditated fashion, planning this,” said Brown, who is Buffalo’s first Black mayor.

“But we are a strong community and we will keep moving forward,” he said. “This is a community that is experiencing development. People have been hoping and waiting for investment and growth and opportunity. We won’t let hateful ideology stop the progress that we are seeing and experiencing in the city of Buffalo.”

As is often the case after mass shootings in the United States, Brown called on Congress to enact tougher gun control laws, saying, “We have to put more pressure on lawmakers in Washington, those that have been obstructionists, to sensible gun control, to reforming the way guns are allowed to proliferate and fall into the wrong hands in this country.”

Such pleas after past mass shootings have mostly gone unheeded, with scant changes in gun control laws. Gun ownership in America is codified in the U.S. Constitution.

Wearing a hospital gown, Gendron was arraigned in court Saturday night on first-degree murder charges and ordered detained without bail. Another court hearing is scheduled in the coming days.

At an earlier news briefing, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia pointedly called the shooting a hate crime.

“This was pure evil. It was straight up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community, outside of the City of Good Neighbors … coming into our community and trying to inflict that evil upon us,” Garcia said.

Investigators said they are reviewing a lengthy statement that they suspect was posted online by the gunman describing his white-supremacist motivations and ideology. The 180-page document details the author’s radicalization on internet forums, as well as a plan to target a predominantly Black neighborhood.

The author described himself as a white supremacist, fascist and antisemite. The statement repeats a far-right conspiracy theory that baselessly argues that the white population in Western countries is being reduced — or “replaced” — by non-white immigrants.

Mayor Brown said the combination of guns and such ideology is combustible.

“It’s not just Buffalo, New York. It’s communities in every corner of this country that are unsafe with guns and with the hateful ideology that has been allowed to proliferate on social media and the internet,” he told CBS. “That has to be reined in. That has to be stopped. It’s not free speech. It’s not American speech. It’s hate speech. And it must be ended.”
…

In his first visit to the American Museum of Natural History, Morgan Guerin had a list. Not of things he wanted to check out, though — a list of things that he hated.

It started with seeing certain regalia from his Musqueam Indian Band — sacred objects not intended for public display — in the museum’s Northwest Coast Hall.

This wasn’t just any visit. Guerin was there at the museum’s invitation in 2017 for the start of a project to renovate the hall, incorporating Indigenous perspectives. For him and representatives of other Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, the 5-year, $19-million renovation of the Northwest Coast Hall, which reopened to the public Friday, was an opportunity to tell their stories themselves.

“Our people are very, very tired of being ‘studied,’ because the misconception of who we are has always been the outside community’s downfall,” he said. “We have always been here, ready to tell people who we are.”

The hall was the museum’s first gallery, opened in 1899 under the auspices of Franz Boas, an anthropologist who was deeply interested in the Indigenous cultures of the Northwest and western coastal Canada. Boas was also a proponent of what was then a revolutionary idea that different cultures should be looked at in their own right and not on some kind of comparative scale.

It had largely remained unchanged, though, since the early 1900s. When museum officials decided it was time to renovate, they knew they couldn’t do it without input from the people whose cultures are on display.

“A lot of what we did was trying to bring this historic collection to the 21st century, and that’s by telling new stories with active voices in all of these communities and nations,” said Lauri Halderman, vice president for exhibition.

The museum brought together the representatives of the Indigenous communities to talk about what the gallery should contain and what it should look like for the showcase of 10 Pacific Northwest tribal nations.

It wasn’t a simple process, made even less so by the impact of the pandemic with its forcing of remote instead of in-person collaborations.

The hall includes some iconic pieces that anyone who has been to the museum will remember – including a massive 63-foot-long canoe that for decades was placed outside the hall but has now been brought in and suspended from the ceiling as well as several giant carvings. But its new exhibit, items are accompanied by text in both English and Indigenous languages and includes a gallery section showing how younger Indigenous artists are using motifs and designs from prior generations.

There was also, and continues to be, the fundamental question of whether museums should be holding these collections and trying to tell these stories in the first place, given the role that theft and colonialization has played in building them, and the way Indigenous communities have been treated.

Museums “seem to function as very expensive, and in the case of the American Museum of Natural History, maybe the most expensive, trophy cases in the world,” said Haa’yuups, co-curator of the hall, who is Head of the House of Taḳiishtaḳamlthat-ḥ, of the Huupa’chesat-ḥ First Nation.

He said, “They seem to have a meta language about them or a meta message, ‘Aren’t we powerful? Don’t we go forth and dominate the world?'”

He saw his involvement as a way to help spur a difference, to get people thinking about whether the items on display would be better served by being with the people they came from.

“Does it make sense to have a bunch of people who have nothing to do with objects, to have them spend their lives managing them?” he said. “Or does it make sense to send those treasures back to the communities where they come from?”

It’s an issue the museum has and is continuing to grapple with, said Peter Whiteley, curator of North American ethnology. He said the institution, which has repatriated items over the years, had decided through the renovation process that it was willing to do some additional limited repatriation and develop greater collaboration between the museum and the native tribes.

Deeper questions notwithstanding, those who took part in the process, both from the Indigenous nations and the museum staff, said it was a valuable one in terms of showing what is possible in terms of collaboration and listening to Indigenous voices.

“The best thing about this, the result of these consultants from the different native tribes,” said David Boxley, representing the Tsimshian tribe, “is that it’s our voice speaking.”
…

A teenage gunman wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera opened fire with a rifle at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in what authorities described as “racially motived violent extremism,” killing 10 people and wounding three others Saturday before he surrendered, authorities said.

Police officials said the 18-year-old gunman, who is white, was wearing body armor and military-style clothing when he pulled up and opened fire at people at a Tops Friendly Market.

“He exited his vehicle. He was very heavily armed. He had tactical gear. He had a tactical helmet on. He had a camera that he was livestreaming what he was doing,” city Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said at a news conference later.

Gramaglia said the gunman initially shot four people outside the store, three fatally. Inside the store, a security guard who was a retired Buffalo police officer fired multiple shots at the gunman and struck him, but the bullet hit the gunman’s bulletproof vest and had no effect, Gramaglia added. The commissioner said the gunman then killed the security guard.

Video also captured the suspect as he walked into the supermarket where he shot several other victims inside, according to authorities.

Police said 11 of the victims were Black and two were white. The supermarket is in a predominantly Black neighborhood a few kilometers north of downtown Buffalo.

“This is the worst nightmare that any community can face, and we are hurting and we are seething right now,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said at the news conference. “The depth of pain that families are feeling and that all of us are feeling right now cannot even be explained.”

Gramaglia said Buffalo police entered the store and confronted the gunman in the vestibule.

“At that point the suspect put the gun to his own neck. Buffalo police personnel — two patrol officers — talked the suspect into dropping the gun. He dropped the gun, took off some of his tactical gear, surrendered at that point. And he was led outside, put in a police car,” he said.

The suspected gunman was later identified as Payton Gendron, of Conklin, a New York state community about 320 kilometers southeast of Buffalo, two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press. The officials were not permitted to speak publicly on the matter and did so on the condition of anonymity.

Wearing a hospital gown, Gendron was arraigned in court Saturday evening on first-degree murder charges and ordered detained without bail. Another court hearing is scheduled for next week.

At the earlier news briefing, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia pointedly called the shooting a hate crime.

“This was pure evil. It was straight up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community, outside of the City of Good Neighbors … coming into our community and trying to inflict that evil upon us,” Garcia said.

Elsewhere, NAACP President Derrick Johnson issued a statement in which he called the shooting “absolutely devastating.”

“Our hearts are with the community and all who have been impacted by this terrible tragedy. Hate and racism have no place in America. We are shattered, extremely angered and praying for the victims’ families and loved ones,” he added.

Separately, the Rev. Al Sharpton called on the White House to convene a meeting with Black, Jewish and Asian leaders “to underscore the Federal government (is) escalating its efforts against hate crimes.” In a tweet, Sharpton said that “leaders of all these communities should stand together on this!”

The shooting came little more than a year after a March 2021 attack at a King Soopers grocery in Boulder, Colorado, that killed 10 people. Investigators have not released any information about why they believe the man charged in that attack targeted the supermarket.

At the scene in Buffalo on Saturday afternoon, police closed off an entire block, lined by spectators, and strung yellow police tape around the full parking lot.

Witnesses Braedyn Kephart and Shane Hill, both 20, pulled into the parking lot and saw the shooter.

“He was standing there with the gun to his chin. We were like what the heck is going on? Why does this kid have a gun to his face?” Kephart said. The suspect dropped to his knees. “He ripped off his helmet, dropped his gun, and was tackled by the police.”

Tops Friendly Markets released a statement saying, “We are shocked and deeply saddened by this senseless act of violence and our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.”

At the White House, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden was receiving regular updates on the shooting and the investigation and had offered prayers with the first lady for the victims and their loved ones.

“The president has been briefed by his Homeland Security adviser on the horrific shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., this afternoon. He will continue to receive updates throughout the evening and tomorrow as further information develops,” Jean-Pierre said.

Attorney General Merrick Garland was briefed on the shooting, Justice Department spokesperson Anthony Coley said.

More than two hours after the shooting, Erica Pugh-Mathews was waiting outside the store, behind police tape.

“We would like to know the status of my aunt, my mother’s sister. She was in there with her fiance, they separated and went to different aisles,” she said. “A bullet barely missed him. He was able to hide in a freezer, but he was not able to get to my aunt and does not know where she is. We just would like word either way if she’s OK.” 
…

Twenty people were injured in two shootings in downtown Milwaukee near an entertainment district where thousands of people were watching the Bucks play the Celtics in the NBA’s Eastern Conference semifinals, authorities said.

None of the injuries from either shooting were believed to be life-threatening.

The first shooting Friday night, involving three victims, occurred adjacent to the Deer District — an entertainment district with numerous bars and restaurants where large crowds often assemble for major sporting events.

The Milwaukee Fire Department said authorities took two people to a hospital, a 30-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl, and a third person drove to a hospital. Police said a 29-year-old man was in custody.

Seventeen more people were injured in a second shooting about two hours later, which happened a few blocks away. Ten people were taken into custody and nine guns were recovered, local station WTMJ-TV reported.

There was no immediate indication whether the two shootings were related or involved fans who were watching the game.

Witnesses told WTMJ-TV that they saw a fight outside a bar following the basketball game.

Bill Reinemann, a parking attendant at lot adjacent to Deer District, said he heard gunshots but didn’t see anyone get shot or see the shooter during the earlier shooting.

“It sounded like six to eight gunshots,” he said “It was close.”

After the shots were fired, scores of fans began running toward the Deer District, he said.

Reinemann, who has worked the lot for 18 years, remained at his post even as fearful Bucks fans ran past him.

“I sat in my chair here the whole while,” he said.

“The incident took place outside of the Deer District area. We direct all questions to the Milwaukee Police Department,” Bucks spokesman Barry Baum said.

Boston defeated Milwaukee in the game to force a Game 7 in the series.
…

Abortion rights supporters will protest in cities across the United States on Saturday, kicking off what organizers said would be “a summer of rage” if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide.

Planned Parenthood, Women’s March and other abortion rights groups organized more than 300 “Bans Off Our Bodies” marches for Saturday, with the largest turnouts expected in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago.

The demonstrations are in response to the May 2 leak of a draft opinion showing the court’s conservative majority ready to reverse the 1973 landmark decision that established a federal constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.

The court’s final ruling, which could give states the power to ban abortion, is expected in June. About half of U.S. states could ban or severely restrict abortion soon after a ruling vacating Roe.  

Organizers said they anticipated hundreds of thousands of people to participate in Saturday’s events, which they said would be the first of many coordinated protests around the Supreme Court’s decision.

“For the women of this country, this will be a summer of rage,” said Rachel Carmona, president of Women’s March. “We will be ungovernable until this government starts working for us, until the attacks on our bodies let up, until the right to an abortion is codified into law.”

Democrats, who currently hold the White House and both chambers of Congress, hope that backlash to the Supreme Court decision will carry their party’s candidates to victory in the November midterm elections.  

But voters will be weighing abortion rights against other issues such as the soaring prices of food and gas, and they may be skeptical of Democrats’ ability to protect abortion access after efforts to pass legislation that would enshrine abortion rights in federal law failed. 

On Saturday, demonstrators in New York City plan to march across the Brooklyn Bridge, while protesters in Washington will meet at the Washington Monument and then head to the Supreme Court. Los Angeles protesters planned to meet at City Hall, and a group in Austin was to convene at Texas’ state capitol.

In the past week, protesters have gathered outside the homes of Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, who have voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to the leaked opinion.

Students for Life of America, an anti-abortion advocacy group with campus chapters across the country, said it was holding counter protests on Saturday in nine U.S. cities, including in Washington.
…