Theosis: CSWR Annual Publication 2024-25

The CSWR welcomed its largest research cohort, totaling 48 scholars, researchers, program leads, and student research assistants, with research projects and interests spanning Africa and African diaspora religions, Asian religious traditions, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Studies, Indigenous plant medicine traditions of the Americas, philosophy, arts, and music.

The Center launched four reading groups and workshops for the fall semester, covering the teachings as well as movements of G.I. Gurdjieff, a twentieth-century mystic and spiritual leader, Thinking with Plants and Fungi, and Psychedelics and Spirituality.

Fall programming began on a high note with the opening art exhibit, “Initiatory Visions,” showcasing the drawings of Peruvian artist and shaman Randy Chung Gonzales, whose work explored the intersection of Indigenous shamanic wisdom and visual art.

The academic year’s first poetry event brought together Stephanie Burt, Jackie Wang, Nat Raha, and Ethan Seeley for a reading of their award-winning poetry.

Acclaimed writer Sumana Roy gave a talk, “The Quest for the Plant Script,” as part of the “Thinking with Plants and Fungi” fall speaker series. Roy focused on the legacy of Jagadish Chandra Bose and his efforts to scientifically capture the handwriting of plants, moving through Rabindranath Tagore’s songs about the language of flowers.

In her book talk, “What We Remember Will Be Saved: A Story of Refugees and the Things They Carry,” journalist and scholar Stephanie Saldaña shared her journey across nine countries to meet refugees and learn what they salvaged when they escaped.

In an interdisciplinary conversation on psychedelic consent, experts discussed what the psychedelic field can learn from spiritual care, bioethics, and the kink community, and how consent approaches can be tailored to unique psychedelic settings: clinical, religious, and personal.

Monthly walking tours of the history of psychedelics research at Harvard explored the University’s long history with psychedelics, from early ethnobotanical studies to the activism of the 1960s and beyond.

The CSWR hosted its largest conference ever, marking the 100th anniversary of G.I. Gurdjieff’s visit to Harvard University in 1924. Featuring leading scholars, academics, representatives from the Gurdjieff Foundation, and independent centers, the conference drew more than 300 in-person attendees from Europe, South America, and the United States. More than 2,000 people from 40 countries watched online.

Through a series of workshops focused on peer editing, pitching magazines, and creative writing, the CSWR shared the expertise of its researchers and staff to help Harvard students, scholars, researchers, and affiliates improve their writing skills. The nearly 20 participants from across the University learned techniques of constructive criticism, explored the creative art of revision, and discovered strategies for sharing their work beyond traditional academic journals to reach broader audiences.

Artist-in-Residence Sarah Schorr led the “Thinking through Photography” workshop, which brought together Harvard faculty, students, staff, as well as local photographers and writers at Walden Pond on a day when it was completely frozen over. Approaching images as vessels for questions and embracing nature and the senses, participants engaged in photography as a practice of sense-making.

Poet-in-Residence Alice Oswald hosted a reading of her poetry, a performance writing workshop for Harvard Divinity School students, and “The Weighing of Souls,” a lecture-performance, where she used the fitting setting of the Emerson Chapel to attempt, in her words, to find one of the lost plays of Aeschylus.

Highlighting three research tracks—psychedelic chaplaincy, the traditions surrounding Indigenous plant medicines, and psychedelic art and aesthetics—the “Psychedelic Intersections” conference attracted more than 1,000 scholars, practitioners, experts, and policymakers from 24 countries, both in person and online, to advance the mission of psychedelic scholarship, opening with Mazatec community member Elías García Méndez and concluding with a closing address by Burning Man Project CEO Marian Goodell.

“Resonance of Grace,” an immersive sound bath experience led by Sufi vocalist and sound artist Umer Piracha, took the audience on a meditative journey of spiritual connection and communal healing.

In partnership with the Awi’nakola Foundation, the “Thinking with Plants and Fungi” initiative took 12 students, postdoctoral fellows, and researchers to British Columbia to engage in dialogue with Indigenous knowledge keepers, scientists, and artists of the Pacific Northwest. The group explored old-growth forests alongside First Nations leaders and concluded their visit at the annual Kinship Gathering at the Big House in Victoria.

Prof. Gavin Flood gave the annual Hindu View of Life Lecture, entitled “Beneath the Texts: Tantric Views of Person, Community, and the Sacred.”
Prof. Jennifer Scheper Hughes gave the annual Hackett Lecture of Global Christianity, entitled “Toward a Counter-history of Global Christianity: Reflections on Brokenness and Transcendence from Mexican Catholicism.”

Nearly 100 attendees gathered to celebrate the release of the new issue of Peripheries, the Center’s annual literary and arts journal. The event featured readings from acclaimed poets, Carl Phillips and Amanda Gunn, and two winners of the Center’s Poetry Competition, Alinh Dolinh and Alan Yan, introduced by Joshua Bell, as well as a multimedia display of poems and art from the new issue.

“An Interdisciplinary Exploration into the Mind of Nature” conference culminated the 18-month “Thinking with Plants and Fungi” initiative. Drawing more than 1,500 attendees both in person and online, the event featured keynote presentations from Merlin Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, Emanuele Coccia, Banu Subramanian, Jessica J. Lee, Zoë Schlanger, Monica Gagliano, and Michael Marder, as well as panel discussions with presentations from over 15 scholars, and an art installation, with participants also having the opportunity to tour the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.