New Year's Bingo will help you focus on what is most important as you move into a new year. Print off more than one card and play with friends and relatives!
Say "Goodbye" to 2024 and say "Hello" to 2025 in style!
Later this year (Sept 16-18) IOBT will be hosting the 75 th Northwest Buddhist Convention and also celebrating our 75 th Anniversary of the temple! Because the pandemic has made everything so uncertain, we are holding out hope that things will get back to normal. We HOPE to have the convention in person with guests here from around the Northwest. We HOPE to gather together to have meaningful services, discussions, and workshops. Most importantly, we HOPE to have fun together as fellow Jodo Shinshu Buddhists. You might be wondering what the convention theme is all about. We thought, since we are celebrating our temple’s 75 th anniversary, that the theme should focus on the history of our Northwest temples AND then look ahead to our influence on the future of Buddhism in our region and our country. First I want to share some reflections on our temple’s past. I’ve been looking at many old photos with my mom. These pictures bring back memories of our temple’s past. There are pho...
NOTE from Rev. Anne Spencer: We always enjoy sharing insights and experiences from our diverse IOBT community. This month we are happy to share a reflection from Keith Hopper. Although Keith now lives in Florida, his early years were spent in Vale, Ontario, and parts of western Idaho. He graduated from Ontario High School. In 2022 he received a tip from a friend about our twice-monthly Tuesday evening online discussion groups and he decided to join us. He has been a regular at our meeting ever since. Let us know if you would like to join us too! "The medium is the message" was a familiar twentieth century adage. Enigmatic, separated from its context and author (1960s Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan), it was claimed by academics, promoters of all sorts, and also politicians, television preachers and other dubious sages. It has a ring to it and seemed to apply to our world, likely did, but as something of a koan . The exact meaning is fuzzy. On advic...
As we prepare for our temple's 75th anniversary celebration this fall, I've been taking time to remember the old days and my experiences growing up at IOBT. One of those experiences was "Sunday School!" Even though we were Buddhist, we called it “Sunday School” not “Dharma School”. There were so many children that we had several partitioned classrooms in the basement where we had our “Sunday School” classes. Teachers kept attendance charts with stars for those who were present. At the end of the Sunday School year, we received “Perfect Attendance” pins. I was so proud to have earned a 3-year pin. It wasn’t easy getting from Nampa to Ontario before Interstate 84 was built, but my dad made sure we were there every Sunday! As Easter Sunday approaches this year, I wanted to reflect on this photo from 1962 that I found in an old album. It makes me think about our temple and how we worked to become a part of the larger Treasure Valley community. Kathy and Donna wit...
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