CSWR Annual Publication 2025-26

CSWR Visiting Scholar

"It is hard to imagine a better environment for a scholar of religion than the CSWR. The leadership and the entire staff are there to make you feel at home, and the fact that I was living at the Center while spending my time there has made that experience even more meaningful. The sense of common purpose, amid the diversity of interests and backgrounds of the fellows, creates a space where scholarly creativity and intellectual rigor go hand in hand. And then of course if one also considers access to the extraordinary facilities of the Divinity School, with its beautiful library, it is easy to understand why my time at the Center was among the most rewarding of my academic life. Credit goes to all those who work hard at the Center to make the beautiful vision with which it was created many years ago a vibrant reality for today’s scholars."

CSWR Artist-in-Residence

"During my month as Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of World Religions this April, I experienced a rare and meaningful convergence of art, scholarship, and spiritual inquiry. What made the residency so extraordinary was not only the freedom to continue my studio work, but the remarkable openness and support extended by the staff, visiting scholars, and students throughout the Center. There was a genuine willingness to engage the arts as a legitimate mode of inquiry, something many artists have been longing for, if impatiently.   

CSWR is a kind of refuge. The support and intellectual generosity I encountered created an atmosphere where unexpected connections could emerge naturally, and I left with the strong feeling that many of the relationships formed there will continue well beyond the residency itself. Teaching a version of my seminar on mysticism and creativity became one of the most meaningful experiences of the month. During the second session, the group entered into thirty minutes of silent drawing together, and afterward no one wanted to leave; least of all me.   

The residency also marked an important turning point in my studio practice. During my time there, I began five new paintings and found the conceptual and emotional direction for the next body of work. As spring arrived in Cambridge, the campus itself began to feel charged with a strange and almost dreamlike presence. Walking alone through Harvard Yard well past midnight, surrounded by silence, old brick, and sudden-flowering trees, the University often felt less like an institution than a living atmosphere of memory and inquiry. Even the rabbits around the Divinity School began to seem… not like regular rabbits. What remains with me most strongly is a renewed belief that art can function not merely as expression, but as a serious and vital path of investigation into mystery, perception, and human experience." 

Poet-in-Residence

"The eighteen days I spent at the CSWR in January feel, in retrospect, like a spiral-armed galaxy of conversations—within the Center, with visiting artist Sarah Schorr, Gosia Sklodowska, AmarAtma Khalsa, Sherah Bloor, Charles Stang; beyond it, with Terry Tempest Williams, Marshall Ganz, Barry and Gretchen Mazur, three generous curators, even the genetic-engineering biologist who walked me on snow-covered paths to the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s front door…. I’ve carried home seeing the Vantablack and Indian Yellow of the Fogg’s Pigment Collection; the Houghton Library’s first printed Galileo; the Woodberry Poetry Room’s memorial to Fanny Howe; and a blizzard. While in residence, I gave a reading and hosted a discussion that could have gone on hours longer. With Sarah, I circumambulated Walden Pond, frozen and silent in the day’s last light; with Gosia and Sarah, visited Margaret Fuller’s grave. I also found a way to set down at last some thoughts I’d wrestled with for months, on humility and its connection to both not-knowing and awe. The CSWR welcomed me into something thrilling and perfect: a life between monastery and agora. Those in residence may change year to year, but it must always be a place of magical feasting—a banquet of ideas and explorations, of actual meals and of intentions toward larger understanding and the larger good, a banquet that keeps refilling itself with new and astonishing courses."

CSWR Visiting Scholar

“There are certain advantages to working as an indepen-dent scholar, but one also finds oneself longing for certain features of academic life. These include: the glories of an excellent library; ready access to campus galleries and events; opportunities to meet and share your work with colleagues; dedicated research support; and especially

the ability to meet younger scholars within one’s fields of interest. While the sense of deep con-tinuity that has traditionally been a feature of the university is currently under assault by many factors, there remains a deep current to insti-tutions like the Harvard Divinity School that is noticeably absent from the fragmented milieu of public intellectual life and research. So I was very happy and honored to receive an invitation to participate as a visiting scholar at the CSWR in the fall of 2025. The invitation alone served as the sort of professional confirmation rarely bestowed on independent researchers (at least this one!)."

Artist-in-Residence

"I feel deep gratitude at having joined the diverse network of researchers and artists associated with the Center for the Study of World Religions. I’ve twice been a visitor at the Center, this last semester in residence for a month. On both occasions, I made some quite profound connec-tions to other scholars there, deeply enriching my creative process and providing nourishment to various projects I continue to work on. It’s a very special community of bold minds and generous hearts and I look forward to the ongoing fruits of our connection."