New Thought undertones suffused the New Day, a periodical published by Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, during the 1930s. Bold-faced headlines such as “That Which You Vividly Visualize You Will Materialize” or “The Invisible Is the Reality of the Visible” were clear signposts of that highly influential yet utterly decentral-ized movement that swept across the United States beginning in the latter decades of the nineteenth Century Somewhat more surprising, however, would have been the mixing of these more conventional mind-cure sentiments with ones that highlighted the importance of material substance and the sacredness of human flesh: witness titles such as “Your Bodies Are the Temples of God” and “The Physical Bodies Are the Realizers.” Even more startling may have been titles like “The Material Food We Eat… Is the Actual Tangibilization of the Personification of God's Word, God's Love and God's Presence” and “God Is God in a Body Just Like a Doctor Is a Doctor in a Body—God Has a Body Just Like a Doctor Has.”

A motion picture is a product formed by the intricate inter-play of film industry forces and cultural expectations. Hollywood must attract audiences and audiences crave gratification or, perhaps, edification. Movies with religious themes can deal with momentous issues, but take the risk of affronting deeply held beliefs. Problems naturally arise when matters as sensitive and speculative as the activity of the Creator and the role of the created become entertainment marketed to mass audiences. Technicolor scenery, special effects, celebrity actors, spiced-up scripts, and other big-screen production values may seem disrespectful or may divert attention away from serious reflection. Critics of consumer society have pointed to the manipulation, superficiality, and commercialization found in mass media environments and film scholars have evaluated movies with religious topics, but questions remain about cinematic treatments of ultimate meaning. The motion picture industry's customers have a multitude of spiritual perspectives.

The expanding volume of publications on Buddhism in America in the last two and a half decades bears witness to the emergence of an exciting new subfield within American religion, on the one hand, and within Buddhist studies, on the other. For Americanists, it reflects a growing recognition of the ways in which non-Western religions are altering the American religious landscape. As such, it is part of an emerging awareness of the increasingly pluralistic and multicultural nature of American society at the turn of the millennium. For Buddhologists, the spread of Buddhism in America opens a new chapter in the long history of the geographical and cultural diffusion of the religion since its founding in India some 2,500 years ago. This new subfield thus holds the prospect of studying what promises to be a momentous development in the history of Buddhism, and it affords an opportunity to study the acculturation of the tradition as it is actually occurring. Clearly this is a field where both Americanists and Buddhologists have much to contribute and much to learn from one another.