Reading Groups are open to Harvard affiliates. Please check the events calendar for the latest times and dates.
Psychedelics Reading Group
Psychedelics: Sacred and Subversive: A Reading and Learning Group Exploring the Altering of Religion
Co-organized by Paul Gillis-Smith and Jeffrey Breau
Spring 2024: Every other Tuesday, noon-2 pm.
First meeting: Jan 30, CSWR Conference Room (Subsequent Meeting Dates: 2/13, 2/27, 3/19, 4/2, 4/16) Please register to attend the Psychedelics Reading Group. Registration is required. 
Are psychedelics going to save religion? What ethical and moral questions surround psychedelic use, especially for substances which have roots in ancient or indigenous traditions? Who gets to decide what is real vs. hallucination—and how do psychedelics challenge our answers?
This year-long reading and learning group will address these and many other questions shaping the study of psychedelic spirituality—questions that are increasingly urgent for religious scholars, practitioners, and policy makers as we enter new legal landscapes. Through text-based weeks and experiential field trips, participants will explore diverse topics including the psychedelic underground, indigenous traditions using psychedelics, cults, metaphysics, and decolonization. This group will be working in concert with a spring CSWR psychedelics conference and participants will be able to collaborate on that event.
Plant (and Fungi!) Consciousness Reading Group
Co-organized by Rachael Petersen and Natalia Schwien
Spring 2024: Every other Thursday, noon-2 pm.
First meeting: January 25, CSWR Conference Room (Subsequent Meeting Dates: 2/8, 2/22, 3/7, 3/21, 4/4, 4/18) Please register to attend the Plant (and Fungi!) Consciousness Reading Group. Registration is required.
Do plants think? Do fungi dream? What can the more-than-human world teach us about the nature of mind?
Recent scientific research has shed light on the sophisticated ways in which plants and fungi sense, make sense of, and interact with the world. Alongside these discoveries is a wave of interest in the “more-than-human” humanities. This scholarship raises fundamental questions about the nature of the human and the non-human: what is mind, where does it extend, and how? What is matter, and what does it mean to label it “animate” or “inanimate”? How do plants and fungi trouble our understanding of “thinking,” and perhaps cause us to reconsider what it means to be human? This year-long reading group will explore these questions and more, engaging works from leading thinkers such as Emanuele Coccia, Monica Gagliano, Suzanne Simard, Michael Marder, and more.
Microdosing Zarathustra Reading Group
Co-organized by Nicolas Low and Russell Powell
Spring 2024: Every other Thursday, 12-2 pm.
First meeting: Feb 1, CSWR Conference Room (Subsequent Meeting Dates: 2/15, 2/29, 3/28, 4/11, 4/25) Please register to attend the Microdosing Zarathustra Reading Group. Registration is required.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is many things—poetry, polemic, philosophy, even farce. Its author, Friedrich Nietzsche, called Zarathustra a “holy book” or “fifth gospel,” something he was incapable of reading even a single page of without bursting into tears. This spring, our reading group will seek to understand Zarathustra on its own terms. What sort of work is this book that Nietzsche claimed was both “for all and for none”? How does Zarathustra speak to us now—as authoritarianism is on the rise across the world, as environmental crises deepen, and as experiences of social alienation and disenchantment intensify? And perhaps most importantly, what does Zarathustra require from us, its readers, to gain the instruction it promises?
The assumption of this reading group is that an adequate encounter with Zarathustra will entail modes of engagement and reflection that may deviate—sometimes radically—from conventional academic inquiry. We’ll seek to be imaginative in our discussions, therefore, using a combination of creative prompts and conversational approaches in order to account for the multiple registers Zarathustra asks us to think, talk, and act upon. As part of the “Transcendence & Transformation” research initiative at the CSWR, our aim to “microdose” Zarathustra’s words is to provide an effective means at metabolizing Nietzsche’s text for the ways it can serve as a resource in renewing our understanding of how transcendence and transformation might be practiced. While we will work our way through the entirety of Zarathustra’s text, group members also can choose to pursue a true “microdosing” experience by reading an abbreviated, distilled set of recommended passages.