2023-2024 End-of-Year Letter from Director, Charles M. Stang
Dear colleagues and friends of the CSWR,
It has been another busy but amazing year at the Center for the Study of World Religions! It’s impossible, in an annual letter like this, to showcase all the amazing researchers, events, and publications of the past year – for that, I’m afraid you must subscribe to and read our newsletter. But I’d like to celebrate this past year by first highlighting our amazing community of scholars: 24 researchers (including visiting scholars, research associates, post-doctoral fellows, and other affiliates) and 13 student research assistants. They’ve been very busy this year, not only with their own private research but with sharing the fruits of that research. Examples include new books, such as by Keith Cantú and Andrew Jacobs; articles in journals, such as by Amy Yu Fu and Giovanna Parmigiani; essays like Nick Low’s in Harvard Divinity Bulletin; presentations at conferences (too many to name!); Matt Dillon’s podcast PopApocalypse; and Giovanna Parmigiani’s speaker series Gnoseologies; and there are many others! I would like to draw your attention to the Center’s new “Research Reflections” series, in which our affiliates translate their research and scholarship for a broader audience. I want to thank Gosia Sklodowska for launching and overseeing this important new series, and Aaron Ullrey for his writing and editorial acumen. You can find all 18 reflections from the past semester on our website, including Jason Storm’s Glimmering Gods of the Electric Age, Fabien Muller’s Is Religion True? Christians and Buddhists, and the Difficult Quest for Truth, and Alicia Mayer’s Dominating the Unsaved, among these outstanding essays.
The scope and scale of our programming continue to grow. We hosted 58 public programs, including lectures, art exhibitions, conferences, reading groups, workshops, fieldtrips, and more! Across all those programs, we hosted more than 4,200 attendees, in person and online. We had over 85,000 visits to our website in the past year, and over 8,000 members on our mailing list. These numbers are very encouraging: it is clear that the Center’s offerings, especially in the Transcendence and Transformation initiative, are resonating with diverse audiences.
First, I’d like to call attention to the two events in “spirituality and the arts” we hosted, one each semester: the first was Enheduanna: Voicing the Feminine Divine; the second Thunder, Perfect Mind. In each case, we sought not only to bring an ancient text to life for contemporary readers, but to do so through a combination of scholarly lectures and artistic performances. In each case, specially-commissioned world premiere musical pieces were performed, and portions of the ancient texts – poems in Sumerian and a hymn in Coptic – were sung in their original languages! These events were unlike any other I’ve ever hosted, or indeed attended, and for both we have CSWR Visiting Scholar Anne Harley to thank.
On November 30, we celebrated the release of the latest issue of Peripheries, the annual literary and arts journal published by the CSWR, and edited by CSWR resident Sherah Bloor. In my remarks that evening, I said, “Of all the efforts the CSWR has supported over these past five years, the launch of the series on ‘Poetry, Philosophy, and Religion,’ and the publication of the journal Peripheries, were our earliest successes, and are perhaps what I am most proud of as I look back on my tenure so far.” The evening event featured poetry readings from Victoria Chang, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald, as well as a jazz improvisation with Sam Weinberg.
The CSWR is very pleased to be partnering with the Mahindra Humanities Center (FAS) and the Petrie-Flom Center (HLS) on the Harvard Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture. As part of that Study, and a part of our years-long investment in “Psychedelics and the Future of Religion,” the CSWR hosted its second annual conference, Psychedelic Intersections: Cross-cultural Manifestations of the Sacred, on February 17. Keynote speakers included Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, Director of the Wasiwaska Research Center, and Dr. Carl Hart, Professor at Columbia University and author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups. That conference was organized by Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith, who both recently graduated from Harvard Divinity School, and who will soon be joining the CSWR as full-time Project Leads for the CSWR’s portion of the Harvard Study.
We ended the year’s programming on a very high note, with our conference on “Platonism as a Living Tradition.” Although the conventions of contemporary scholarship discourage them from admitting it, scholars of Platonism are very often Platonists who understand themselves as part of a living tradition. Our conference’s aim was to gather scholars whose writings demonstrate an existential investment in that tradition, and to invite them to reflect on their part in it. The later Platonists spoke of a Golden Chain, a community of philosophers for whom Platonism was a way of life, a path of intellect and heart, of reason, revelation, and reverence. We wished to honor this tradition and its relevance for the world today.
We are enormously grateful to the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation for the generous grant that enables us to launch the “Thinking with Plants and Fungi” initiative this past January. This initiative builds on the momentum created by the CSWR’s reading group on “Plant (and Fungi!) Consciousness,” which has been running for two years, led by Rachael Petersen and Natalia Schwien. The initiative will culminate in an exciting conference next May, in collaboration with the Wonderstruck Podcast. If you’re interested in learning more, consider checking out Rachael’s interview with Michael Pollen, who was a member of the reading group in its first year; or Natalia’s review essay in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin; or this video of our field trip to the “Church of the Woods” in Canterbury, New Hampshire.
We are thick in the planning of next year. We’re eager to welcome an outstanding new cohort of scholars to our community, and to introduce them and their research to you. We also look forward to sharing more exciting new programming we have in the works. But for that, we will wait until late August.
Finally, I want to share the good news that Gosia was recently appointed as the Executive Director of the Center. Congratulations, Gosia, and thank you for all that you do for the Center staff, residents, and scholars!