In the past thirty-five years, Boston, like other major cities in the United States, has seen some remarkable changes. In the years since the 1965 Immigration Act reformed a very restrictive quota system, immigrants from all over the world have come to make Boston their home. Of course, the Boston area has long received immigrants, from the arrival of the Mayflower and the colony of John Winthrop to the present. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the newcomers were from England. In the nineteenth century, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe brought rich Jewish, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox traditions.

The new immigrants of the late twentieth century, however, have come from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East as well as from European countries. In the ten years between 1980 and 1990, the Asian-American population of Boston doubled to 5.3 percent of the total and the Hispanic population increased to 10.8 percent. The African American population increased only slightly to 25.6 percent, while Boston's white population fell by 8 percent to 62.8 percent, even though the fast-growing Hispanic population is included in this group. Native Americans and people of other races comprise 6.2 percent of the population. Although these figures include only the city of Boston itself, a view of the wider Boston area would reveal similar changes. No matter how you look at it, the Boston of today represents a radically new racial, ethnic, and cultural reality.

With these immigrants have come religious traditions that have made the religious life of Boston far more complex and textured than ever before. These immigrants are Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, and Korean, both Buddhist and Christian. There are South Asian immigrants -- Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Sikh, Zoroastrian, and Christian. In addition, there are Arab immigrants, some of them adherents of the Muslim faith and others Christians, largely Syrian Orthodox. There are many immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, and there are new, energetic Hispanic Catholic and Pentecostal churches. There are Afro-Caribbean practitioners of Vodou and Santeria. And there are new Jewish immigrants from Russia and the Ukraine.

How we encounter religious and cultural difference is certainly one of the most important questions our society faces in the late twentieth century. The story of such encounters is really the history of New England, beginning in the seventeenth century when the Puritans and Pilgrims encountered the Native peoples of this area, the Wampanoag, the Nipmuc, and the Narraganset. There were meetings, feasts, and the translation of the Bible into Algonquin. But by the 1670s, the wars that would lead to the decimation of the Native population began. The first chapter in the history of cultural encounter was not an exemplary one.

In the 1600s, religious diversity was unacceptable in the Puritan commonwealth. Indeed, the occasional Quaker, Baptist, or Jew was "warned out" of Boston. Between 1659 and 1661, four Quakers were hung on Boston Common. Fortunately, there was a reaction against banishing and hanging those with divergent views. In the period of the Revolution and the framing of principles for a new American republic, a consensus began to emerge which built religious freedom into the heart of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The First Amendment to the Constitution stipulated that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This principle became the very foundation of religious pluralism: No one religion is to be established by the state, and free exercise of religion is protected. Of course, at that time religious freedom would have been imagined largely within the denominational spectrum of Christianity. But the principles of non-establishment and free exercise have been tested, affirmed, interpreted, and reinterpreted for two hundred years in contexts of ever-increasing religious diversity.

By the nineteenth century, the Protestant tradition of Boston, now at home with its own diversity, was challenged by the new and growing presence of Catholics and Jews who came as immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. Gone were the days when people of different beliefs could be "warned out" of town, but prejudice and nativism continued to operate in subtle and overt ways to perpetuate tribalization and division. After more than a century, Boston's Catholic and Jewish communities are now very much part of the Boston mainstream, but the challenges of living in a society of religious, racial, and ethnic diversity have multiplied and are still very much on the agenda of Boston and other major cities.

When New England's first mosque was built in Quincy Point in the shadow of the great cranes of the shipyard, it was the only gathering place for the Islamic community. Now there are over thirty Islamic centers and masajid in the Islamic Council of New England, one of which is located in a storefront next to a Chinese restaurant in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. There are Muslim communities in Dorchester and Wayland, in Worcester and Sharon; even the basement of a Harvard Yard dormitory serves as an Islamic center and prayer room for the university's growing Muslim population. As of June 2000, the Islamic Society of Boston is planning to build a new mosque in Roxbury that will accommodate 1600 people for prayers.

Religious traditions with roots in India are also growing in Boston. The Jain Center of Greater Boston has been established for over fifteen years in a former Swedish Lutheran Church on Cedar Street in Norwood. The Jains, who trace their religious tradition back to teachers in India more than 2,500 years ago, are part of a growing number of Indian Americans who have immigrated in the past twenty-five years. In Ashland, the Sri Lakshmi Temple on Route 135 stands not far from the starting point of the Boston marathon. It is a traditional Hindu temple, designed by ritual temple architects according to traditional measurements and built by a Wellesley engineering firm. Its consecration in May 1990 attracted thousands of Hindus from the Indian-American community in the Boston area. Water from the Ganges River was poured over the temple's towers at its consecration -- along with waters from the Merrimac, the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Colorado. While the Sri Lakshmi Temple is surely New England's largest, there are Hindu temples in Dorchester, Lowell, and Stow, and there are a dozen other Indian-American regional groups that gather for Hindu religious holidays.

There are over twenty Buddhist communities in the Boston area. Some of them are attended by Euro-American Buddhists, whose heritage in Boston goes back to the 1890s and the early "Boston Buddhists," William Sturgis Bigelow and Ernest Fenollosa, who were initiated into Buddhist practice in Japan. Today there are Zen centers in Cambridge and Providence, Vipassana meditation centers in Cambridge and Barre, Tibetan centers in Cambridge and Brookline. And there are new immigrant Buddhist communities, including three Cambodian Buddhist temples in Lowell and Lynn, Vietnamese temple communities in Roslindale, Dorchester, and East Boston, and Chinese temples in Quincy and Lexington.

The list goes on. There are Sikh gurdwaras in Milford and Millis; a Zoroastrian Association of Greater Boston; Baha'i Centers and Vedanta Centers. There are Wiccan groups, an EarthSpirit community, and practitioners of Afro-Caribbean Santeria. And in response to this new religious reality, there are a growing number of interfaith initiatives, such as the Boston Clergy and Religious Leaders Group for Interfaith Dialogue, the Interfaith AIDS Ministry, the Brockton Interfaith Community, the Needham Interfaith Committee on Social Concerns, and the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization.

Religions are not fixed and packaged, passed along like boxes of treasures from generation to generation. They are more like rivers, dynamic and changing, bearing the heritage of the past to water the fields of the present. As traditions of faith from many parts of the world move into the American context, they will inevitably adjust and change, as will the communities and congregations who now find themselves encountering new neighbors. This process of encounter, dialogue, and transformation is critically important today as American cities begin to appropriate a new multi-religious reality.

This is a work-in-progress. It is necessarily a very selective portrait, especially of the Native American, Christian, and Jewish traditions. Only a small sample of churches, synagogues, and Native groups could be included here. Even this small sample suggests to new Bostonians, unfamiliar with these traditions, something of their diversity in the metropolitan area. Because Boston's religious traditions are also "works-in-progress," we hope to hear of new developments and changes, to hear of our errors and omissions, and to invite your participation in the work of the Pluralism Project.