Ralph H. Craig III

Ralph H. Craig III is a scholar of religion whose research focuses on pre-modern South Asian Buddhism and late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American religious history. He received his B.A. in Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University and his Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Stanford University. His dissertation is a study of early medieval representations of Buddhist preachers across South Asian Buddhist literature. His research interests include religious authority, religious experience, religion and race, popular culture, memoir, metaphysics, meditation/yoga studies, ritual and performance studies, intellectual history, and philosophy. He has a forthcoming religious biography of Tina Turner titled, Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner (Eerdmans Publishing, 2023), which explores the place of religion in the life and career of Tina Turner and examines her development as a Black Buddhist teacher. His future projects include a monograph on Buddhist preachers in Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras, a Black Buddhism documentary reader, and a monograph on the SGI-USA Nichiren Buddhist organization.