Center for the Study of World Religions

Residents at the CSWR are scholars deeply committed to the study of religion. Below, we spoke with Matthew J. Dillon, a Transcendence and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow historian of religions with a focus on mystical and gnostic currents in...

Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TV’s, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil...

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...

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. FULL TRANSCRIPT: [MUSIC...

“We always begin by thanking our ancestors,” said Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol farmer and food justice activist, at the start of her September 17 talk, “Farming While Black: African Diasporic Wisdom for Farming and Food Justice,” hosted by the Center for...

Scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the prize-winning Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, and Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Richard...

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...

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...

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...

Charles Stang, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions and Professor of Early Christian Thought, delivered the first Price Lecture of 2019 at Trinity Church Boston on March 10, 2019.