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Living Texts

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Living Texts is a new CSWR video series that invites scholars, writers, and practitioners into conversation with formative texts from religious, spiritual, philosophical, and literary traditions. Each episode centers on one or more texts chosen by the...

Video: Poetry Reading: Writing as Alchemy with Laynie Browne, Julie Carr, & Chloe Garcia Roberts

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On November 13, 2025 the CSWR and Sherah Bloor, Editor-in-Chief of Peripheries, hosted three poets—Laynie Browne, Julie Carr, and Chloe Garcia Roberts—who read from their new books, each engaging in its own way in an intertextual communion with the living...

Previous Events

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International Field Trip During Spring Break 2025, the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative organized an international field trip to Vancouver Island in partnership with the Āwi’nakōla Foundation. Designed to deepen participants’ understanding of...

2023-2024 End-of-Year Letter from Director, Charles M. Stang

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Dear colleagues and friends of the CSWR, It has been another busy but amazing year at the Center for the Study of World Religions! It’s impossible, in an annual letter like this, to showcase all the amazing researchers, events, and publications of the...

Video: Release Party for Peripheries Vol. 5

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The 2022 edition of Peripheries, the HDS & CSWR literary and arts journal, is out now! As always, it includes some of the best contemporary poets and artists, alongside the work of our brilliant HDS students. Issue five is the most experimental issue yet...

Video: Transcendence and Transformation

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Charles M. Stang, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), discussed the Center’s new initiative, “Transcendence and Transformation,” and introduced its first cohort of research associates and post-doctoral fellows: Matthew Dillon...

Video: Studying Our Religions in the Particular and Meaning Something By It

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On October 20, 2010, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at HDS, gave this lecture to mark his appointment as director of the CSWR. A response was given by CSWR managing director Susan Abraham...

Video: Affect Theater and Collaborative Meaning-Making

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On November 2, 2022, Dr. Giovanna Parmigiani discussed affect theater with her guests Prof. Cristiana Giordano (UC Davis) and Prof. Greg Pierotti (University of Arizona), and how it can transform academic research. This discussion touched on the role of...

Video: Divining the Feminine in Tibet: Saga & Sādhana of Yeshe Tsogyal

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Yeshe Tsogyal, the leading female presence of Tibet, appears in two distinct genres of literature, autobiographical and ritual practice texts (sādhana). Anne Carolyn Klein/Rigzin Drolma draws on a recent practice texts related writings to conclude that...

Video: The Hindu Margins: Third Gender and Women Spiritual Partners

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This lecture focused on the Hindu view of life from the margins. While the “Hindu margin” is a fairly large heterogeneous group, this lecture laid the lens on the third gender, Kinnars (pejorative term hijṛā) and spiritual partners, categorized as...

Video: Dis/appearing: Black Life, Theodicy & the Study of Religion with Biko Mandela Gray

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Thursday, April 6, 2023 - Center for the Study of World Religions held its annual Greeley Lecture in Peace and Social Justice (Race, Religion, and Nationalism Series), welcoming Biko Gray, Assistant Professor of American Religion at Syracuse University to...

Thoreau, Joseph Nicolar, and the Penobscot World

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In this inaugural episode of Living Texts, Gosia Sklodowska speaks with John Kucich about Henry David Thoreau’s “The Allegash and East Branch” and Joseph Nicolar’s Life and Traditions of the Red Man.