Harvard Divinity School’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality is delighted to announce that our spring 2023 conference will be organized around the theme of “Uses and Abuses of Power in Alternative Spiritualities.” We welcome proposals for papers, panels, workshops, and performances related to this theme, or to other aspects of alternative and evolving spiritualities. We expect the conference to be in late April 2023, and will post exact dates on our website as soon as they are confirmed!
Our conference will explore a twofold reality: alternative spiritualities can be enormously empowering for the persons who participate in them, but they can also be sites of deeply harmful abuses of power. We welcome proposals that explore only one side of this reality as well as those that explore the connection between the two sides. We especially welcome proposals designed to foster open-hearted dialogue between people who have benefited from alternative spiritualities and those who have experienced significant harm from them.
For the purposes of this conference, we define “alternative spiritualities” broadly in keeping with the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality’s mission to support the scholarly study of emerging spiritual movements, marginalized spiritualities, and the innovative edges of established religious traditions. Presentations on new religious movements, indigenous spiritualities, diasporic traditions, and spiritually-oriented social movements are all welcome!
As is true for all of our programming, we welcome proposals from spiritual practitioners and leaders, from scholars working in many disciplines, from social change activists, and from artistic creators. Proposals developed by groups of people representing more than one of these categories are especially encouraged.