For our third episode, we welcome the #1 New York Times best-selling author Whitley Strieber. Whitley discusses his boyhood as a Roman Catholic, the erotic dimensions of alien contact, his lifelong meditative practice, evolving views of the afterlife, and the recent U.S. Congressional testimony concerning Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs).

Whitley Strieber is the author of "Communion", one of the most iconic books in the literature of the unexplained and the bestselling nonfiction book on UFO-related subjects in history. His most recent book about...

For episode five of the pod, we are honored to welcome Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Chair of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. In this career-spanning chat, we discuss Kripal’s Catholic upbringing, psychoanalysis, and the ecstatic experience in Calcutta that changed the direction of his career. From there, we touch on Jeff’s role at Esalen, historical mystics and paranormal powers, telepathic insects, and how the study of religion and popular culture come together in film, comedy, and comics.

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in...

As part of the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative, the CSWR is proud to announce its first ever podcast. Pop Apocalypse explores the mystical and the mythic, the paranormal and the psychedelic in popular culture.... Read more about Audio: Pop Apocalypse: Psychedelic Gnosis and the Imaginal Double with Laurence Caruana

As part of the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative, the CSWR is proud to announce its first ever podcast. Pop Apocalypse explores the mystical and the mythic, the paranormal and the psychedelic in popular culture.... Read more about Audio: Pop Apocalypse: Waking from the Flesh Dream with Alex and Allyson Grey

In this first episode of the Faculty Focus podcast, HDS Professor Charles Stang discusses psychedelics and spirituality, early Christianity and demonology, and why Dune makes for good academic inquiry.... Read more about Audio: Faculty Focus: Charles Stang on Why 'Dune' Makes for Good Academic Inquiry

Stephanie Paulsell, HDS Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies and Interim Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, discusses her recent publication about Virginia Woolf.... Read more about Video: Religion Around Virginia Woolf Author Discussion

Artist and author Rachel Sussman shares her physical, intellectual, and spiritual journey around the world and through time-space.... Read more about Video: All the Time in the World: An Artist’s Awakening with Ayahuasca

K. Healan Gaston, Harvard Divinity School Lecturer in American Religious History and Ethics, discusses her recent publication, Imagining Judeo-Christian America—Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy.... Read more about Video: Imagining Judeo-Christian America—Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy

What might it look like to see Jerusalem, with its cross-hatched encounters between people of diverse faiths and cultures, as a city of the book?... Read more about Video: Jerusalem: City of the Book

Graham Harvey, professor of religious studies at The Open University (UK), discusses animism and how our relations are damaged by ongoing efforts to separate (human) culture from ‘nature’ and humans from other species.... Read more about Video: We Have Always Been Animists

Michael Marder discusses the paradox of “excessive heat” that, on the one hand, signals the ardency of faith and the love of God and, on the other, the effect of sin configured as ariditas (dryness), undoing viriditas (the greening green, a self-refreshing power of creation).

In the annual Hindu View of Life lecture, Ruth Harris examines how Vivekananda conveyed the meaning of “guru-bakhti” to his female disciples, and the spiritual lens through which he sought to mold them in a male spiritual milieu.... Read more about Video: Gurus, Women, and Yoga: The Spiritual World of Hindu Universalism

The ongoing destruction of Earth’s natural systems is the result of decisions, made daily, by billions of people. These decisions are voluntary and involuntary at once, collective and personal. Two indigenous leaders—Nainoa Thompson and Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq (Uncle)—have both been identified by their communities as messengers who will guide us through climate challenges as they reflect on their traditions and spiritual practices.

Nainoa Thompson is the president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and a Pwo navigator, who, inspired by his kūpuna (...

This talk contradicts the longstanding reading of Emerson as invested in idealism and instead charts his obsession with matter both organic and inorganic, organized and unorganized. By attending to his interest in sciences of life, Branka Arsić reconstructs the geological and botanical theories that led him to formulate a genuinely vitalist ontology; and by outlining his vitalism... Read more about Video: All One Stuff: Emerson's Materialism

Presented as a rational, scientific, and practical religion, modern Buddhism appears to have all the answers. Even the secular forms of mindfulness promise ever-increasing practitioners that Buddhist meditation will provide the solutions to all their mental, emotional, and spiritual issues. But is there a problem with all of this?

In his new book, A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real, scholar Glenn Wallis argues that there is, and that Buddhism as we know it "must be ruined." On March 11, 2019, Wallis was in conversation with HDS professor...