A View Of Hindu Culture For Kansas Students , USA

Source: www.bethelks.edu
Saturday,March27,2010

NORTH NEWTON, KANSAS, : For Paul Lewis, Bethel College professor of psychology, an integral part of his Social Cognition class is having students directly encounter the Hindu Indian culture. Every other spring since 2002, Lewis has been taking students to celebrate Holi - which honors spring, fertility and new beginnings - with the congregation of the Hindu Temple and Cultural Society in Kansas City and to meet with members of the Vedanta Society, an ecumenical group of devotees who worship Shri Rama Krishna.

“As a graduate student,” Lewis says, “I had experience working on some cross-cultural projects featuring comparison and contrast of North American Caucasians with South Asian Hindu Indians.” From this experience, he became aware “of a fair amount of the scholarly cultural psychology literature pertaining to a comparison of these two cultures.”

Cassidy McFadden, sophomore from Elgin, Ill., explains that one of the goals of the Social Cognition class is “to learn a little bit about how people view themselves and others, and one of the best ways to do that is by analyzing another culture - and our own in the process.” Students began the semester reading about Hindu religion and culture before traveling to Kansas City for a long weekend to experience some of what they had been learning about.