Alfred Bloom (Buddhist)

Alfred Bloom
Born	1926 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Occupation	Author and professor
Nationality	American
Subject	Shin Buddhism and Religious Studies

Alfred Bloom is a pioneer of Jodo Shinshu studies in the English-speaking world.

Born 1926 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Bloom was the youngest child of a Jewish father. At the time of Bloom’s birth, his mother had been a recent convert to a fundamentalist tradition of Christianity. After enlisting in the United States Army in 1944, Bloom studied Japanese at the University of Pennsylvania and performed his service in occupied Japan. During this time, he promoted fundamentalist Christianity and encountered the concept of Amida Buddha when a Christian minister explained a passage from the Christian scriptures by using Amida Buddha as an analogy.

Bloom began his academic life at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (BA., Th.B.) in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania from 1947 to 1951. During this time he began to question, and then to abandon, the fundamentalist approach to the Bible which he had previously held.

He completed his theological training at Andover Newton Theological School (B.D., S.T.M.) in Newton, Massachusetts in 1953. He later encountered the teachings of Shinran while studying Japanese language and (Chinese) Buddhism at the Harvard–Yenching Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts and gained his doctorate with a thesis on Shinran’s Life and Thought in 1963.

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