At the Intersection of Research and the Public Good

Expanding research programs and a surge of researchers enhance the CSWR’s reach and impact

The 2023-24 academic year might just be the busiest one yet at the Center for the Study of World Religions. In addition to the Center’s numerous and lively lectures, art exhibits, and guest talks that all students (and most often the general public) are invited to attend, the CSWR’s Transcendence and Transformation (T&T) initiative is now entering its third year and is expanding considerably, with new funding and a widely expanded crop of visiting scholars, postdoctoral fellows and research associates who will broaden T&T’s reach and impact.

Below, Charles M. Stang, Professor of Early Christian Thought and director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, outlines the Center’s key research areas, celebrates its core and affiliated researchers, and reflects on how the Center engages with the local and broader public to share its research findings and foster deeper understanding of traditions that foster practices of transcendence and transformation.

Harvard Divinity School (HDS): The CSWR has a long and successful history of rich programming, promoting deeper understanding of various religious and spiritual traditions and acting as a convening space for scholars and practitioners. What makes this current academic year unique or different from past years?

Charles M. Stang:  All of our programming and research for this year builds on the very solid foundation which was laid in the past years and is consistent with the Center’s mission. But what is different about this year, and what I am genuinely thrilled about, is the unprecedented expansion of our research cohort. We have welcomed many new scholars and researchers into our community and now have close to 25 visiting scholars, postdoctoral fellows and research associates, several of whom are also part of our residential program. They are all excellent scholars in their own right, representing wide-ranging academic, spiritual or religious backgrounds and areas of expertise. They have joined us from China, India, Australia, Liechtenstein, Italy, Mexico, Canada and the US.

Several of them work on research projects that stem from our Transcendence and Transcendence Initiative, but a few of them, joined us with their own independent research projects in mind. They work in close collaboration with HDS faculty and provide us with vital, productive connection to HDS and its broader academic environment. 

Some of our current projects lie at the intersection of philosophy and ancient religious traditions, or current spiritual movements, or may rely on ethnographic fieldwork that looks at conspiracy theories among practitioners of alternative spiritualities. But we also have visiting scholars such as Professor Alicia Mayer whose research looks at Calvinism, and at how its particularities in the Puritan mentality impacted perceptions and interactions with different societies in the New World; or Professor Hai Jin, who is researching esoteric Buddhism traditions in China.

They are now all part of our thriving research community. Within just a few short weeks, thanks to regular meetings, presentations, impromptu chats, all our researchers have all started discovering joint interests synergies and areas of possible collaborations.

I see enormous potential in bringing so many excellent minds together and having the Center provide a framework that fosters discussions and collaborations. I am very curious to see what comes out of them and how this could translate into more programming, research collaborations and publications.

HDS: The CSWR has, to some extent, always been an incubator of different ideas and different research focuses. What are some of the Center’s key areas of focus at this time?

CS: There are three areas that I want to highlight. First, there is philosophy of religion.

I started my education in philosophy and then migrated to religious studies because I found the academic discipline of philosophy somewhat narrow. I have kept an interest in philosophy and I think that some of the most interesting work lies at the intersection of philosophy and religion, and so we put out a call for a postdoctoral fellowship in philosophy and religion to see what work might surface. And it yielded three very interesting, very different scholars, all of whom align deeply with the T&T Initiative.

We have Russ Powell, working on transcendent experiences and how to translate them into the public realm, and their impact specifically in American environmentalism, for good and ill, especially around issues of race, gender, and class. His work challenges us to think how we should hold claims of transcendent experience accountable in a democratic society.

Fabien Muller is a wonderful example of comparative philosophy of religion and theology. He works between ancient Christian and Buddhist traditions, so the Eastern Mediterranean and South Asian contexts. He is a serious scholar of both these traditions. He works in the original languages, Greek, Syriac, Sanskrit and others, and he is particularly interested in highlighting the metaphysical concerns of these authors that are often sidelined. He is also concerned to highlight the way in which Indian traditions get treated as some sort of secular philosophy. He also continues the Centers’s longstanding comparative tradition, specifically the tradition of comparative theology that the former Center director, Francis Clooney, pioneered. Fabien fits wonderfully in this wake

And finally, we have Nickolas Low.  His project is a particular interest of mine, because I first fell in love with philosophy after reading Frederick Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a figure who straddles philosophy and religion, and Nick, I think, more than anyone I have talked to in recent years, seems alive to the way in which Nietzsche is after transcendence and transformation, in a way that does not fit most academic treatments of Nietzsche. Nietzsche is issuing a call that we have yet to hear. So that’s Philosophy or Religion.

Another research focus is Embodied Wisdom, which is a category that includes both research and programming we are investing in. On the research side, there is ambitious project led by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Sarabinh Levy-Brightman. They are exploring embodied pedagogy in religious studies: how do we bring the body into the classroom, how do we acknowledge that teaching and learning is always an embodied practice, and how do we better engage the body in the practice of learning. They have gathered a group of people to explore this topic, I am happy to be one of them, but several other CSWR affiliates are involved as well. They are pursuing an edited volume and related programming. 

On the programming side, we have been hosting a series of workshops that supplement the standard curriculum at HDS. Workshops from scholars like David Abram, who was our Visiting Professor in Natural Philosophy last year, who held workshops out in the woods, inviting us to activate our full sensorium and engage with the more-than-human-world, trying to make animists of us all, or those were not, already.

We also have this semester a very interesting workshop with Anne Harley, our scholar in residence, called the “Muscle of the Self,” challenging us to reclaim our voice and discover the essence of our person, soul, different forms of our embodiment, through sound, breath and voice, and to see what kind of transformations it might enable. We also look forward to our spring workshop with Deji Ogunnaike, another visiting scholar for the year and former student here at Harvard, who is now a professor at the University of Virginia. This workshop will be focused on Yoruba spirituality and divination techniques, and will ask the participants to engage in these practices, not only to learn about them.

And of course, there is the Center’s longstanding focus on Spirituality in the Arts, which grows out of a conviction that creativity and spirituality is something that we need to invest in as a School. We started exploring that first through poetry, then through other forms of art, such as the exhibitions that we've been doing in this space.

This most recent focus came out of a partnership with the Georgio Cini Foundation in Venice, the Warburg Institute in London, and the Center for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. The directors of those three centers and I happened to be in Venice last year. They expressed an interest in a collaboration, and we got together and asked, what do we all have in common? And this was the thing we all had in common—an interest in spirituality and the arts.

HDS: It seems as if it’s expanded beyond just poetry and what would be considered more traditional expressions of the arts, correct?

CS: Yes, we opened it to the arts writ large, including gaming environments, which is something curious that we've not really leaned into. I was already prepared to take roleplaying games seriously, but that's because I played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. I still play with my daughter and my brothers, actually, and I know that's a kind of a curious, weird religion. Tara Smith, one of our new postdocs, is working on wargames, the art of painting miniatures, and gaming environments as sites of religion and spirituality. Warhammer 40,000 is her focus, and that’s part of Spirituality in the Arts.

HDS: Thinking about Transcendence and Transformation more broadly and for the next few years, what are some of the biggest research questions or areas you think are most promising and have the biggest potential?

CS: I feel very strongly about what we’re doing with Peripheries and poetry. I want that to continue to flourish. Giovanna Parmigiani's series on Gnoseologies is very popular and very interesting to me. She's asking about ways of knowing other than those typically rendered legitimate in the academy in a way that's not just celebrating those ways of knowing, but also being, at times, suspicious and critical of those ways of knowing.

So, whether it's Giovanna's championing of magic as a way of knowing or her very incisive critique of the ways in which conspiracy and spirituality conspire to form conspirituality, she’s doing important work for the Center.

I feel like the humanities has exiled some of these other ways of knowing—to their detriment and to our discredit. It's dangerous to banish other ways of knowing. Even if you only want to critique them, you need to keep track of them.

The real promise of Gnoseologies is to expand our epistemology and ontology, and that's one thing I think that the study of religion needs desperately: to have a more expansive ontology and epistemology,  a more capacious understanding of reality and how we know it.

This year, what's great about Psychedelics and the Future of Religion is that we're coordinating the speaker series that I host with this student group run by two HDS students who are fantastic.

And then we have the Pop Apocalypse podcast with Matt Dillon, and we have a new research associate, Adam McCollum-Bremmer, with whom I'm going to launch a series of primary texts and translations from the Eastern Mediterranean through the Silk Road into Central Asia. We are going to focus on what you might call philosophy, spirituality, and religion, but at the margins of traditions.

We're also excited to announce a new project, the T&T Database, led by research associate Matt Dillon, and supported by researchers Aaron Ulrey and Keith Cantú. You'll be hearing a lot more about that database in the coming months.

HDS: Why have psychedelics become a fairly significant focal point in the Center’s programming and research over the last couple years?

CS: I am most interested in psychedelics as one among many means for what we are calling Transcendence and Transformation—that is transcending our accustomed states of knowledge, being, and perception, and transforming ourselves as individuals, as groups, and as societies.  Psychedelics, to me, is one among many techniques for transcendence and transformation.

Some of my frustration with the conversations around psychedelics is what I sometimes call psychedelic exceptionalism, or psychedelic supremacy, where there are those who think that psychedelics explain all modes of transcendence and transformation.

It's important to see psychedelics within a kind of broader suite of practices of transcendence and transformation, or practices of ecstasy, by which I mean standing outside of our accustomed states, altering ourselves and our states of consciousness.

So psychedelics finds itself in the company of things like silence, song, dance,  intensive spiritual reading, meditation, or prayer, whether that prayer is silent or voiced.

All of these, and many others that I'm not thinking of right now, are part and parcel of the history of religions. These are tools and technologies that religions have used to induce profound states of transcendence and transformation.

What excites me about psychedelics in this contemporary moment is that it's drawing attention to this crucial issue at a time when I think the study of religion has largely left this to one side, to be perfectly honest. And that's why so many people are interested in the conversation around psychedelics because they may have tried them, and they may have had some extraordinary experiences. They want to make sense of that. A lot of times people have these experiences, and they can't help but label them as deeply spiritual and meaningful. And they don't know how to contextualize that in the history of religions or in the history of their own religion, for instance, if they have been raised in some kind of religion.

I think that psychedelics can be positive in contemporary culture, because they can draw attention to the fact that we are more than we often take ourselves to be. But just as with any kind of trend or fashion, there are excesses. And the psychedelic renaissance has its own excesses in all different ways. But as I already referred to, there's a lot of exaggerated claims about psychedelics.

HDS: How will CSWR researchers and visiting scholars be engaging with students and the broader community this year?

CS: Well, the most direct way that any of our affiliates interact with students is through our programming. And almost all of our programming is, to some degree or another, public. It might be limited, but it's public. 

Reading groups, workshops, lectures are the ways that students can interact with the minds that come through the Center. And of course, that can be in person or through Zoom.

Following on the Center’s interest in psychedelics, you could say that we want T&T to send out spores. And so in order for it to spore, we have to have enough people here. We have to have a very robust program both in programming and research, with the hope that our affiliates and HDS students will go out like spores and spread T&T. 

HDS: How can people become engaged with what's happening at the Center? I'm specifically thinking about some of the new students who will be reading this piece and wondering how they can get involved.

CS: The advice I would give to students is to sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of our website’s homepage, try a workshop, and check out the public offerings of T&T, specifically the reading groups. That's probably the easiest way to find your way into the community.

The plant consciousness reading group is almost like a mini-CSWR. It's really something. Come over and use the meditation room, the library on the second floor, which is a quiet place for study and reflection, and of course the HDS Garden right beside us.

—HDS Office of Communications