Source: www.boston.com
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, September 13, 2009: Reporters attending the annual convention of the Religion Newswriters Association boarded a pair of buses from downtown Minneapolis out to Maple Grove where, on 80 acres surrounded by farmland, the region’s Hindu community is completing work on one of the largest Hindu temples in the U.S.
The Hindu Temple of Minnesota boasts a library, meeting rooms, a cafeteria and an auditorium, and one striking room, lit by a series of skylights, in which 21 shrines ring a large open floor area. This temple is unlike anything you would see in India — there, temples are typically centered on a single deity, but because this is the U.S., where the Hindu community hails from all over India as well as the Hindu diaspora, the temple opted for a variety of shrines to meet the needs and devotional practices of a diverse group of worshipers.
The temple serves an estimated 40,000 Hindus in Minnesota and the surrounding states; the community had been worshiping in a former church starting in 1978, broke ground for the temple in 2003, and finished most of the work this year.
After the tour, a panel on Hinduism in America featured three experts on the subject, Anantanand Rambachan, the chairman of the religion department at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, who gave an overview of American Hinduism; Khyati Joshi, an education professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, who talked about her research on second-generation Hindu-Americans, and Suhag Shukla, the managing director of the Hindu American Foundation, who talked about issues facing Hindus in the American public square.