Research Reflections
Universal Blackness among the Muridiyya and Its Artists
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. Francesco Piraino, Tenure-track Research Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Director of the Center for...
It Loves To Happen
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. I am a painter. The first thing I do in any new studio is to write—in tiny pencil letters, in a corner or by the...
Knowledge Like Life-Giving Rain
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. Imagine living in a world where you are told that most of what is around you is only an opaque refraction of true...
Aryavarta, Land of the Noble Ones
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. In 1891, readers of a small American journal called The Path encountered an article by a Jodhpur pandit titled...
How Psychedelic Science Invented a History of Religion
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. It is challenging for me to imagine a time before the concept of “the psychedelic” existed, despite its emergence...
The Childless Ascetic
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. When I was seven years old, through songs and poems, my teacher, a widow, instilled in me an awareness of the...
The Literary Gods of Roberto Calasso
Nicholas Low is a Research Fellow, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School and a Fellow, Center for Theory and Research, Esalen Institute The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic...
The Mirror’s Other Side
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. Reports of near-death experiences (NDEs) are not simply a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century phenomenon...
Loanwords along the Silk Road
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. Lots of the words and phrases we use every day are “loaned” or otherwise sourced from other languages. “Coffee,”...
The God in the Mirror
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. Around 1797, Matsudaira Sadanobu (1759–1829), the feudal ruler of Shirakawa domain and senior advisor to the...
