Doors in Every Direction
Since its founding in the late 1950s, the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at HDS has been a home to students and scholars who further questions and bring new perspectives to the study of world religions. At a time when the Divinity School was predominately Christian in its identity, the newly established Center focused on religion more broadly, including Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism—promoting the comparative study of religion at the University and beyond. Each faculty director since then has brought a unique vision and focus to the Center’s activities, research, and programming that ripples out and revolutionizes the wider work of the School.
Now, almost 75 years later, the School is a thriving multireligious community—and the Center continues to evolve its inquiry to meet the moment. “I think of the Center as an exploratory think tank that is able to devote time, space, and resources to the thoughtful investigation and anticipation of pressing issues and questions in the study of religion,” says Charles M. Stang, CSWR director and Professor of Early Christian Thought. The Center’s Transcendence and Transformation initiative encourages students and scholars to explore other ways of knowing and engaging with a multilayered reality.
Crossing Boundaries, Extending Ways of Knowing
“The Latin preposition ‘trans,’ as in transcendence, transformation, and transgression, at its most basic level means, across or beyond,” explains Stang. “It implies movement: from one place to another, from one state to another, across something like a threshold, a line, or a boundary. The Center is committed to this movement across and beyond, to explore oneself and others, and to embark on an adventure, into this world and into other worlds.” This is an effort Stang explores in his recent Harvard Divinity Bulletin essay, “The Smoldering Superhuman.” In a recent interview, Stang remarked, “We are premised on the idea that reality is multilayered. Transcendence doesn’t only mean up. Transcendence means crossing a boundary, and that boundary can be in any direction. And I think we have convinced ourselves that we are locked inside our histories and our identities as if in closed rooms. But there are doors in every direction.”
One way the Center is starting to open some of those doors is through the exploration of the other ways of knowing, often referred to as gnosis in Western traditions. Giovanna Parmigiani’s series “Gnoseologies” explores how these ways of knowing are becoming more common and influential in contemporary society, popular culture, and even academic research. Additionally, Matt J. Dillon’s Pop Apocalypse podcast explores the mystical and the mythic, the paranormal and the psychedelic in popular culture.
“I think of the Center as an exploratory think tank that is able to devote time, space, and resources to the thoughtful investigation and anticipation of pressing issues and questions in the study of religion."
—Professor Charles M. Stang, CSWR Director
The Center’s work now extends well across Harvard. Thanks to a generous gift funded by the Gracias Family Foundation, collaborative research on the ethical, legal, and social implications of psychedelics in society is underway with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Law School. HDS’s Office of Ministry Studies has joined this interdisciplinary effort to explore psychedelic chaplaincy. By recontextualizing these ideas for modern times, the Center is reconnecting with sources of knowledge about humanity—how humans experience relationship and communion with other entities and the wisdom humans might encounter beyond their default perspectives.
Announcement of a Groundbreaking Gift
Harvard will create a Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture with a gift from the Gracias Family Foundation. The study, an interdisciplinary effort across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Divinity School, seeks to transform the psychedelics research landscape by producing cutting-edge scholarship and convening faculty, students, and experts to engage in discussion around their farreaching implications. . . . The $16 million gift will include an endowed professorship with a broad focus on human health and flourishing, as well as research support across the University.
It comes at a time when interest in psychedelics has risen in recent years among the scientific and academic communities, driven by findings that they may help treat disorders such as PTSD, depression, and addiction when used in conjunction with therapy. In 2021, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at HLS established its Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) to examine the ethical, legal, and social implications of psychedelics in research, commerce, and therapeutics.
In addition, the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at HDS examines psychedelics as they relate to altered states of consciousness, the relationship of mind and matter, and the global history of spirituality and religion.
Excerpt from the October 2023 Harvard Gazette article “Harvard launches new Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture”
Exploring the Mystery of More-Than-Human Minds
For the past several years, the Center has explored what philosopher and former CSWR visiting scholar David Abram calls our “more-than-human” neighbors: the Earth’s plant, fungal, and animal life. Cutting-edge scientific research illuminates the sophisticated ways plants and fungi interact with their surroundings, challenging long-held definitions of mind and matter. Inspired by this research and its implications, the Center launched the Plant Consciousness Reading Group that has attracted students, faculty, and staff from across the Divinity School and beyond.
The group discusses diverse thinkers who question what the mind is, whether plants possess it, and what it would mean if they did. As Michael Pollan, Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer and Professor of the Practice of Non-Fiction, explains, plant intelligence offers “building blocks [to] help us understand consciousness.” Understanding the minds of humans and of other species may open new ways of relating to the natural world.
The reading group has also laid the foundation for a broader initiative at the Center, “Thinking with Plants and Fungi,” which was made possible thanks to support from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation. “This effort explores concepts central to our understanding of mind, matter, and cooperation,” says Gosia Sklodowska, executive director of the CSWR. Informed by both contemporary science and land-based wisdom, key questions include: How do plants and fungi challenge prevailing notions of intelligence, agency, and sentience? How have philosophical and theological traditions, past and present, grappled with vegetal and fungal life?
To bring these questions to life, the CSWR offers guest lectures, field trips, and other experiential learning opportunities, in addition to original scholarship and commentary via a blog. One campus tour led by Harvard Herbarium Professor Donald Pfister took a closer look at lichen and symbiotic lessons of mutualism among fungi and algae. Another field trip immersed students and affiliates in the spiritual community known as the Church of the Woods—offering an opportunity to witness the intersection of spirituality, care, and community with all elements of nature during a service held in the depths of the forest of Canterbury, New Hampshire. The initiative will culminate in an interdisciplinary conference at Harvard in May 2025, featuring speakers such as mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, philosopher Emanuele Coccia, and others.
At a time when humanity requires new or reimagined models of cooperation and co-existence, plants and fungi could offer inspiration for how to tackle ecological and social crises. “How can we look to plants and fungi for perspectives on living?” Sklodowska asks. “How do they work and collaborate, and adapt to different environmental stressors?” Stang adds: “We talk about humans rekindling their relationship with the more-than-human world—recovering this capacity to decenter the human and combat the overwhelming emphasis on ‘us,’ which is required to awaken an ecological imagination and practice.” What results, he says, is an invitation to place humans as one species alongside many within nature, instead of thinking of humans as exceptional entities disconnected from the ecosystems all around us.
With the natural world as its partner, the CSWR is reconnecting with important lessons and sources of knowledge about humility, interconnection, responsibility, and care—values that help shape and inform ethical leadership and deepen our understanding of what it means to be human in our ever-changing world.
Gnostic Mythology and AI: More Connected Than We Think
The basic idea in Gnostic myth is that the god responsible for the creation of our world—the one who demands worship—is actually not the highest god, but a creation of a much higher divinity. According to this myth, we humans were in turn created by this lower tyrant god, who thought he could control us. Although we are his creatures, we contain within us the spark of the higher divinity; so we are, in a sense, a kind of artificial intelligence program that surpasses our own immediate creator.
When the ancient Gnostic myth gets remixed for modernity, especially in science fiction films, what we see is how anxious we are that we humans are like that lower, tyrannical god. We create things, whether through bioengineering or computing, and we worry endlessly that these creations are going to surpass us. And some believe that we humans are not entirely good, but are ourselves tyrannical, and perhaps deserve to be surpassed by an intelligence of our making, much as the lower, tyrannical creator god of Gnostic myth deserved to be surpassed by us.
You see this remixed Gnostic myth at work in movies like The Matrix or The Truman Show, and more recently Ex Machina or The Creator. But there’s a very important difference between the ancient Gnostic myth and its modern remixes. In the ancient myth, the spark within humans is destined to return to the divine realm from which it came. In other words, there is a transcendent realm—they call it the pleroma or “fullness,” which reaches into our world and beckons us to return home. In the modern remixes, that transcendent realm largely falls away, and the movies seem keen to explore the endless iteration of lower worlds and tyrannical gods. I believe the movies bear witness to the contemporary culture’s lack of belief in a transcendence that is truly liberating.
Charles M. Stang, faculty director of the Center for the Study of World Religions and Professor of Early Christian Thought
—By Suzannah Lutz, ALM ’21