New York City
United States
New York City, in the US state of New York, began as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in the 1620s, was renamed by the English in 1664, and took its present five-borough form in 1898. Its universities, Columbia among them (founded 1754), made it a major centre of science and scholarship; B. R. Ambedkar earned his doctorate in economics at Columbia. Union Theological Seminary, founded in 1836, counted Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among its faculty and hosted Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a fellow in 1930, and the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky also worked in the city. In 1930 Sokei-an founded what became the First Zen Institute of America there, an early landmark of Buddhism in the United States.
Teachers who lived here
Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)
early pastorate 1722–1723
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943)
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943)
Franz Boas
Franz Boas (1858–1942)
Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki)
Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki) (1882–1945)
Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich (1886–1965)
Union Seminary professor 1933–1955
Richard Courant
Richard Courant (1888–1972)
B. R. Ambedkar
B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956)
Georges Florovsky
Georges Florovsky (1893–1979)
dean, professor 1949–1955
J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945)
postdoctoral study 1930–1931
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper (1906–1992)
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper (1906–1992)
Chien-Shiung Wu
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997)
Alan Watts
Alan Watts (1915–1973)
Immigrant writer; informal Zen study 1938–1941
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton (1915–1968)
conversion & early writing 1935–1941
Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg (1933–2021)
Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön (1936–?)
Robert Thurman
Robert Thurman (1941–2026)
Robert Thurman
Robert Thurman (1941–2026)
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944–?)
Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg (1952–?)
Works composed here
- 1951
Systematic Theology
by Paul Tillich
- 1952
The Courage to Be
by Paul Tillich
- 1972
Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View
- 1993
The Zen Eye: A Collection of Zen Talks
- 1998
Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness
- 2004
Infinite Life: Seven Virtues for Living Well