For the second year in a row, the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies (SBCS) held its annual meeting online due to the corona virus pandemic. For several decades prior to the pandemic, we met face-to-face in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) as one of its "related scholar organizations." Having applied in 2020 to continue as an AAR "RSO," we were delighted that AAR renewed our status in March, 2021, because we see our own mission as having some important overlap with AAR's. (For these two mission statements, see: https://www.society-buddhist-christian-studies.org/mission and https://www.aarweb.org/AARMBR/Who-We-Are-/Mission-and-Values.aspx.)
This year, in addition to its face-to-face sessions at San Antonio's convention center and downtown hotels, AAR again offered an online video conference platform on which we held our paper sessions late Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. We sincerely hope that conditions are such that early next fall we can commit to meeting in person in conjunction with the 2022 AAR meeting in Denver. Our Friday governing board meetings and members meeting this year were hosted by SBCS President Leo Lefebure on Georgetown University's Zoom platform.
