CSWR Today

Dear colleagues and friends of the CSWR, I hope you have enjoyed a restful and restorative summer. We here at the CSWR are eager to share with you the exciting research and programming we have planned for the fall semester. I would like to thank my...

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...

As we bid farewell to 2023, I wish to highlight two outstanding events from the final weeks of the fall semester: the launch of the latest issue of Peripheries, the literary and arts journal published annually by the CSWR; and a celebration of the life...

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...

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...

MTS candidate and CSWR junior fellow Usra Ghazi began asking questions about religious identity and interfaith understanding at a very young age. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, she was four when her family first arrived in Chicago, later to settle in Skokie...

Few things give the venerable Upali Sramon as much joy as sharing a thought-provoking sutra. "If I've heard a very good discourse or sutra, I can't help but tell it to others," he smiles. "It's all there in the Buddhist literature; it's so profound, but...

For Kalpana Jain, it is all about the power of voice. An investigative journalist from India—and a former Harvard Nieman Fellow in global health reporting—Jain has devoted her working life to giving voice to the voiceless by delving into social issues too...

Meditation and dance teacher, former Buddhist nun, MDiv candidate, and CSWR Assistant Proctor Leslie Hubbard has a knack for looking over a situation, identifying what is missing, and finding a way she can make a contribution. "I first learned about the...

As the study of religion moved into the domain of cultural studies, there came a shift in the subjects of research.Scholars no longer focused solely on so-called world religions but also looked at the interplay between religion and culture in a broader...