“The periwinkle is blooming but I’m looking here.” Professor Don Pfister said with amusement, redirecting a group of thirty, rain-gear clad participants to look away from the delicate purple-blue flowers to where green lichen had formed between bricks on the side of a building.... Read more about Taking a Closer Look at the Natural World with Prof. Don Pfister

Over the years, the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) has encouraged student-led reading groups that center around a topic, author, or text. Groups meet twice monthly throughout the academic year. Reading groups have included, The Divine Feminism and Its Discontents, Animism, Orientalism and Religion, and Modern Psychedelic Spirituality in Historical Context. The 2023-24 academic year will host the continuation of the Plant Consciousness Reading Group and will be adding Psychedelics, Sacred, Subversive: A Reading and Learning Group Exploring the Altering of Religion. Last year, Plant Consciousness drew a particularly robust and enthusiastic gathering. The CSWR spoke with co-founders of the group, Natalia Schwien and Rachael Petersen.... Read more about Plant Consciousness Reading Group: A Conversation with Co-founders Rachael Petersen and Natalia Schwien

It has been another rich year of programming at the CSWR, much of it centering around the Transcendence and Transformation initiative – about to enter its third year. We were pleased to host a fascinating cohort of T&T affiliates, including visiting scholars, post-doctoral fellows, and research associates.  

David Abram joined...

Wednesday, April 26, 2023 - As part of the T&T Gnoseologies Series, CSWR Research Associate Giovanna Parmigiani engages in a fascinating conversation with Black Feminist ethnographer and African diaspora studies scholar, Assitant Professor N. Fadeke Castor.  

... Read more about Video: Multiple Subjectivities and the Ethnographic Study of Lived Religion

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 Christianity.

... Read more about Matthew J. Dillon: Postdoctoral Fellow in Transcendence and Transformation

Artist and author Rachel Sussman shares her physical, intellectual, and spiritual journey around the world and through time-space.... Read more about Video: All the Time in the World: An Artist’s Awakening with Ayahuasca

Graham Harvey, professor of religious studies at The Open University (UK), discusses animism and how our relations are damaged by ongoing efforts to separate (human) culture from ‘nature’ and humans from other species.... Read more about Video: We Have Always Been Animists

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-refreshing power of creation).

Author, activist, and farmer Leah Penniman discusses the movement for food sovereignty and building a food system based on justice, dignity, and abundance for all members of our community.... Read more about Video: Farming While Black

“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 the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard Divinity School (HDS).

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 Powers, author of The Overstory, join Harvard Divinity School writer-in-residence Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, in conversation....

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 Angakkorsuaq (Uncle)—have both been identified by their communities as messengers who will guide us through climate challenges as they reflect on their traditions and spiritual practices.

Nainoa Thompson is the president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and a Pwo navigator, who, inspired by his kūpuna (...

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 reconstructs the geological and botanical theories that led him to formulate a genuinely vitalist ontology; and by outlining his vitalism... Read more about Video: All One Stuff: Emerson's Materialism

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York-Buffalo, speaks on poor mestizos in northern Peru, who offer a new way to theorize humanism and sentient landscapes that interact with humans in terms of environmental justice, collective ethics, and health.... Read more about Video: The Subversive Politics of Sentient Places: Climate Change, Collective Ethics, and Environmental Justice in Northern Peru

"Forests think." Eduardo Kohn, author of the book How Forests Think, discusses a kind of thinking, which he calls “sylvan," that is manifested by tropical forests and those that live with them. This mode of thought can provide an ethical orientation in these times of planetary human-driven ecological devastation that some call the “Anthropocene."... Read more about Video: Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy: Toward an Ecological Ethics for the Anthropocene