Researcher Reflections

William S. Chavez, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Stetson University Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey In 2004, the Vatican requested that all Roman Catholic dioceses appoint and train an exorcist, but as Father Vincent Lampert, former exorcist...

By Avery Morrow Around 1872, Shishino Nakaba, a young samurai and aspiring bureaucrat, encountered loosely organized village societies or confraternities that worshiped Mount Fuji as a god and practiced healing through hand-copied paper talismans rubbed...

By Chloe Martinez I was a college sophomore in an introductory Hinduism class when I first encountered Mirabai, a sixteenth-century Hindu mystic. Her poems felt alive and immediate to me. I remember staring at the page, wondering, “How am I just now...

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. Francesco Piraino, Tenure-track Research Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Director of the Center for...

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. I am a painter. The first thing I do in any new studio is to write—in tiny pencil letters, in a corner or by the...

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. Imagine living in a world where you are told that most of what is around you is only an opaque refraction of true...

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. In 1891, readers of a small American journal called The Path encountered an article by a Jodhpur pandit titled...

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. It is challenging for me to imagine a time before the concept of “the psychedelic” existed, despite its emergence...

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions. When I was seven years old, through songs and poems, my teacher, a widow, instilled in me an awareness of the...

Nicholas Low is an Associate, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School and a Fellow, Center for Theory and Research, Esalen Institute The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of...