Next door to a small house in Coventry Township, a man spends the Sunday afternoon working on his car, while someone fishes in a nearby pond.

From the outside, the house appears to be ordinary. It’s easy to pass by without ever noticing its existence. But on closer inspection, one can see golden Buddhas sitting in the window, and it is clear that this is a place of worship.

Ashin Warinda, along with four other Buddhist monks, lives inside. His living room has been transformed into a shrine complete with dozens of Buddha statues and pots of flowers that signify reincarnation. Hiding within the objects is a small American flag.

Warinda, who came to the United States from Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia formerly called Burma, says it represents the integration of his culture with America.

“I’m happy to stay here. I like it,” he says in a quiet voice with a Mon accent. “When I first came here, they had never seen a Buddhist monk. When we would go to a pharmacy like Walgreens … they would say, ‘Look at the funny man.’ But now it is peaceful.”

He calls his home the Mon Temple, which is a division of the larger Wat Lao Temple a few miles away.

About 40 families come to worship at the temple every week, he says. And it’s not uncommon for the temple to receive visitors who are slightly nervous yet eager to learn more about his religion.

Most of the time the guest is a Kent State student from the Comparative Religious Thought class, which is taught by David Odell-Scott or his wife, Lauren.

Warinda doesn’t mind; he enjoys telling anyone interested about reincarnation, nirvana or anything else associated with Buddhism.

Students also come representing the Ohio Pluralism Project, a research project headed by Odell-Scott that aims to educate Americans on religious diversity through research, outreach and the presentation of resources.

Land of immigrants
The United States may be a land of immigrants, but people from all walks of life have not always been welcome.

Once it relaxed its immigration laws in 1965, the country saw a rapid growth in many new cultures and religions.

Ohio is no different than the rest of the country in increased plurality, or diversity in religious beliefs. As part of the Ohio Pluralism Project, Odell-Scott and Surinder Bhardwaj, Kent State professor emeritus of geology, have undertaken the task of tracking and mapping those religious cultures that arrived after 1965.

Their findings unearth the development of numerous religions, many unknown by those who may be familiar only with the more mainstream religions.

Throughout Ohio, Odell-Scott and Bhardwaj have identified at least 56 Buddhist temples, 24 Hindu temples, 66 mosques, 13 Sikh temples and four Jainist communities.

“As these groups institutionalize, they buy property, and they buy temples,” Odell-Scott says. “We’re trying to track that emergence.”

The increase in different ethnic cultures is in direct contrast to Ohio’s shrinking population, Bhardwaj says.

“Our own American population has been migrating out,” Bhardwaj says. “The younger people and the generation that was trained here are trying to move. But to the outside world, Northeast Ohio is still a place where they can find pretty good jobs.”

The two have focused the majority of their research in northern Ohio but are working to increase their work to the rest of the state.

From Harvard to Kent State
Odell-Scott began the Ohio Pluralism Project in 1998 as an affiliate of the National Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Shortly after receiving a grant from Harvard, Bhardwaj came aboard as a co-director with Odell-Scott, and the two have been close friends since.

Grove Harris, the managing director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard, says the Ohio project presents the only research of its kind in the state. The national project depends on local affiliates such as Odell-Scott and Bhardwaj to do the research.

“This is the only partnership between a professor of religion and a professor of geology, so that makes it unique,” Harris says. “And their long-standing friendship is what has made the partnership so fruitful.”

When meeting with the two men, their differences could not be more apparent. Odell-Scott, a Christian minister from Alabama, works in an office littered with boxes, books and pictures. His mind is rarely doing one thing at a time.

He grew up in the South during a time when the Jim Crow laws were more than just a memory. Living through a time of social change, in an area with diverse ethnic groups, led him to study religion.

“I was used to dialogue across cultural conditions, across religious conditions, across racial traditions,” Odell-Scott says. “It was also in the middle of the civil rights movement. So, all of those influences were a big deal, and I decided I was going to be a minister in my denomination.”

Bhardwaj, on the other hand, is a Hindu priest and Indian immigrant. His office is stuffed with many of the same books as Odell-Scott’s, but his are neatly organized on a bookshelf. Bhardwaj was a cultural geography professor for 35 years before he retired in 2004 and became an emeritus professor.

His interest in religion came from a desire to look back on his own life.

“As you grow somewhat older in life, you want to reflect a little bit more,” he says. “When you reflect, usually your own tradition comes into play a great deal more than when you’re constantly concerned with making progress in your profession.”

The two share a bond and fascination for all things spiritual. And with the Ohio Pluralism Project, the two say they wish to spread a greater knowledge and acceptance between religious groups.

“Mapping” is just a metaphor
When a religious community is established, Odell-Scott and Bhardwaj get to work. The two insert themselves into that religion’s culture and try to develop a relationship with its leaders. A research template that requests information on statistics, development and history is sent to each new religious site.

This involvement has made the co-directors well known in many religious circles.

“They voluntarily are interested to participate because they want to share the story of their lives,” Odell-Scott says. “Sometimes they contact us to tell us if something has changed.”

They are aware of some places of worship through general knowledge, and they discover others from simply driving around town. If a place of worship grows or divides, the leaders make sure Odell-Scott and Bhardwaj are the first to know.

Because of the recent political climate, Bhardwaj says mapping religions is taking a back seat to helping different faiths understand each other. In addition to researching the religious communities, he and Odell-Scott work to promote interactions between faiths by speaking at conferences, working with local religious groups and exposing students to different religious communities.

“It is one thing to academically try to gather the data,” he says. “It’s quite another to get out and be a part of interfaith activity. The Pluralism Project is not simply counting heads. The pluralism is engaging with the other faiths.”

Revealing different cultures to students
In the eight years of its existence, several Kent State graduate and undergraduate students have helped contribute to the Ohio Pluralism Project.

Bob Christy, former student of Odell-Scott’s and university photographer, became the project’s official photographer in 2001.

One of his first assignments was to photograph local mosques.

“I was sort of apprehensive, as it was not long after 9-11,” Christy says. “There were these men there who were watching me wander around. They were laughing because I was so apprehensive.”

Christy says his uneasiness turned out to be unwarranted because many Muslims were eager to debunk the stereotypes that came after the terrorist attacks.

The events coinciding with the War on Terror have made the goals of the project even more relevant today.

Mohamed Ismail, executive director for the Islamic Society of Akron and Kent, has worked with Odell-Scott and Bhardwaj to increase understanding through groups such as the Akron Area Interfaith Council. He also encourages professors to send students to visit.

“We invite people to come and see for themselves,” Ismail says. “That way they get their information straight from the horse’s mouth, rather than from the newspaper, TV or radio.”

Sophomore English major Erin Maxwell visited the Kent Mosque to fulfill her class requirements for Comparative Religious Thought. She admitted before she went her perception of Islam was affected by negative media coverage. But after her visit she says she was comforted to find more similarities than differences with her own beliefs.

Ismail says coverage of Islamic societies is mostly distorted in the American media, focusing on marginalized cases having more to do with cultural rather than religious beliefs.

Nadir Taha, the imam at the center, agrees, saying the biggest misconceptions about the religion are its connection to fundamentalists and its treatment of women.

“If you want to know about Islam, you have to look at what the Quran says about these things,” Taha says. “In it the Muslims were always peacemaking. And never did Mohammed insult or beat his woman.”

Odell-Scott says he begins teaching his Comparative Religious Thought class by telling students the study of religion is dangerous.

This thought leads others to believe their own faith will be tested, he says, and “forces people to think for themselves.”

He says he doesn’t want to blend cultures into a melting pot, but one of the best ways to understand something is to see it directly. This is why he requires all of his students to visit a religious community they are unfamiliar with.

“It doesn’t mean they understand that religious community, but it gives them an opportunity to have a dialogue and experience,” he says. “They begin to realize that these people are not from another planet. They begin to appreciate them and begin to understand their religious tradition.”

Amanda Hunt, senior art history major, says she decided to take the class because of her lack of exposure to non-Western religions. In the days leading up to her trip to the Wat Lao Temple, her first to a Buddhist temple, she says she was excited.

However, she says this excitement was replaced by trepidation as she approached the front entrance.

“Mostly I was worried about defacing Kent State or offending somebody,” Hunt says.

Before she managed to open the door she was greeted by a man saying, “You’re welcome.” That was enough to settle her down.

“I thought that was so cool,” she says. “We could have been anyone. Once I got over my initial nerves of being in a new place, it turned out to be very relaxing.”

Bhardwaj also promotes these new cultural experiences in the geography department, taking incoming graduate students on a day-long tour of local religious communities once a semester.

“I think it is time for us to put our theological differences aside and recognize what are our common human problems. In other words … distress, hunger, poverty, depression,” he says. “We are certainly a little bit of an agent to create that understanding, and if we can do even a little understanding between different faiths, I think we would have contributed something.”

Sean Ammerman is a senior magazine journalism major. This is his first story for The Burr.