Past Events
Video: Who’s Your Daddy by Arisa White in Conversation with Rev. angel Kyodo williams Sensei
Who’s Your Daddy is Arisa White's debut poetic memoir for which, with funding from the Center for Cultural Innovation in Los Angeles, she was able to go to Guyana, South America, to meet her father after 30-plus years of estrangement. With this same...
Video: Honoring the Indigenous Roots of the Psychedelic Movement
A presentation and discussion on the continuities and discontinuities between the world of sacred plants and that of psychedelic science. This talk focused on what psychedelic therapists and scientists can learn from ayahuasca shamanism, as well as...
Video: What is Psychedelic Chaplaincy?
This panel brought together Daan Keiman, spiritual caregiver and facilitator at a psilocybin retreat in the Netherlands, with Jamie Beachy, a MAPS MDMA Therapist and director of the Center for Contemplative Chaplaincy at Naropa University, in dialogue...
Video: Psychedelics: The Ancient Religion with No Name?
The most influential religious historian of the twentieth century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. Did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians inherit the same secret tradition? A...
Video: Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How Deep Learning Still Matters
On December 14, 2020, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., HDS Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology, discussed his recent publication, Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How Deep Learning Still Matters. Jon D. Levenson...
Video: Black And Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom
Buddhism is a way of life, a philosophy, a psychology, a set of ethics, a religion, or a combination thereof. Central to the many ways Buddhism is understood is the achievement of emotional, mental, and psychological wellness. African Americans are at...
Video: White Whales, White Males, Whitehead with Lisa Jarnot
This lecture, which is part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry and was held December 2, explores the doctrine of discovery that haunts American poetry. Lisa Jarnot engages in an autobiographical interrogation of what it means to be a woman in a...
Video: Sisters of the Psychedelic Revolution: A Conversation with Leni Sinclair and Genie Parker
Hippie culture left a lasting impression on the Mid-West of the United States. Historians tend to portray the Haight Ashbury of San Francisco and the East Village of Manhattan as America’s foremost psychedelic hotspots, but it was in the college town of...
Video: The Religion of White Rage
This panel discussion of "The Religion of White Rage" was held November 2 with the book’s three editors, as part of the Center for the Study of World Religion's series on “Race, Religion, and Nationalism.” This book sheds light on the phenomenon of white...
Video: Medicalizing Mysticism: Religion in Contemporary Psychedelic Trials
Amid the so-called psychedelic “renaissance” in science, researchers at Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and elsewhere report that they can occasion “mystical-type experiences” among trial volunteers being treated for depression, addiction...
Video: Fred Moten: Note on a Blue Note in The Gospel of Barbecue
Fred Moten, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, discussed a poem called "On Listening to the Two-Headed Lady Blow Her Horn," which is from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's extraordinary collection, The Gospel of Barbecue. He talked—in the wake and under the influence of...
Video: Spirits of Whiteness in the Age of COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to explore how religion and whiteness are interconnected. Where is religion in a president refusing to wear masks in public? What of whiteness in a governor suing one of its state’s own cities to prevent mask...
Video: The Campaign for (White) Christian America: Lauren R. Kerby in Conversation with Jeff Sharlet
As the 2020 presidential election nears, Lauren R. Kerby and Jeff Sharlet discussed the politics of white evangelicals in the U.S. today. Kerby's book, Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation's Capital and Redeem a Christian America, offers...
Video: Psilocybin and Mystical Experience: Implications for Healthy Psychological Functioning, Spirituality, and Religion
Mystical-type experiences are profound and often characterized by an authoritative sense of the unity and sacredness and sometimes interpreted as an encounter with God or Ultimate Reality. Although such experiences have been described by mystics and...
Video: Contesting the Local in the Global: African Christianities Within the Religious Cosmos
On February 27, Afe Adogame, Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Religion and Society at Princeton Theological seminary and leading scholar of the African diaspora, delivered the Hackett Lecture in Global Christianity. This lecture examined how and to what...
Video: The Jew as Migrant: From Theory to Poetry
On February 25, Vivian Liska, Professor of German literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, delivered the annual List Lecture in Jewish Studies at the CSWR. The Jew as archetypal migrant is a...
Video: The Intelligence Revolution and the New Attention Economy: An Ethical Singularity
Considerable attention has been directed to the possibility of a technological singularity when artificial intelligences “wake up” and start acting in their own self-interest. Long before then, however, humanity will confront an ethical singularity—a...
Video: Becoming the Beloved Community in the Midst of Domestic Terror
This lecture by the Rev. Dr. Joan R. Harrell is a womanist critique of a longstanding racist campaign of domestic terror in the United States. It investigated the intersectionality of racism, in particular the racist acts condoned by religious communities...
Video: Forms of Grief
This talk, held February 3 at the CSWR, examined the forms that grief can take, in the work of Zoe Leonard, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, and John Constable. Kate Zambreno is the author of several acclaimed books, including Screen Tests, Heroines, and...
Video: Religion Around Virginia Woolf Author Discussion
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. Amy Hollywood (HDS) and Terry Tempest Williams (HDS)...
