Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR)

Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), School, 42 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA.
(1)

The Center for the Study of World Religions is a research and programming center based at Harvard Divinity School that seeks to promote the study of religion and spirituality with a special attention to transcendence and transformation. The Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School has particular interest in the historical and contemporary interrelationships among religion

s, and the theological, philosophical, comparative, political, and ethical challenges facing religious communities and those who study them today. It primarily engages the academic community, beginning with the faculty, students, and staff of HDS, and then the wider scholarly community, but also welcomes religious practitioners, policymakers, and the wider public that is interested in religion.

What questions, conversations, and forms of inquiry shaped the past year at the Center for the Study of World Religions ...
08/31/2026

What questions, conversations, and forms of inquiry shaped the past year at the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR)?

Theosis 3, the annual publication of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, looks back on the 2025-26 academic year through essays, interviews, research reflections, visual art, photography, and other contributions from across the CSWR community. Together, these pieces reflect the breadth of scholarly and creative work undertaken at the CSWR, bringing research on religion and spirituality into conversation with art, literature, history, philosophy, and contemporary life.

Theosis 3 documents the intellectual exchanges, collaborations, and public programs that shaped the year, offering a record of the questions and forms of inquiry that continue to animate the CSWR.

Read Theosis 3: https://shorturl.at/nmsyU

In the 1840s, Margaret Fuller used journalism to examine some of the most urgent reform questions of her time: prisons, ...
07/02/2026

In the 1840s, Margaret Fuller used journalism to examine some of the most urgent reform questions of her time: prisons, asylums, discipline, and care.

In a recent essay for the Center for the Study of World Religions' Transcendentalism Initiative, Brigitte Bailey explores Fuller’s writing for the New-York Daily Tribune, showing how she captured both the promise and contradictions of redemptive prison reform.

Fuller reported on hopes for rehabilitation, education, and moral renewal, while also documenting overcrowding, inadequate instruction, and the failures of institutional care.

Read the full essay here: https://shorturl.at/elEMn

Brigitte Bailey is Professor of English Emerita at the University of New Hampshire. She co-edited Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose on Fuller, and the Library of America volume Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings. Her current book project examines periodical depictions of New York, 1830-1860.

The ecological crisis is also a crisis of perception.In a recent essay, Ryan Shea reflects on how Goethe, Thoreau, and E...
06/30/2026

The ecological crisis is also a crisis of perception.

In a recent essay, Ryan Shea reflects on how Goethe, Thoreau, and Emerson can help us cultivate a deeper ecological vision. Drawing on Goethean science and American Transcendentalism, Shea considers ecology not only as a science of the environment, but also as a practice of attention.

The essay asks what it means to truly see nature: to attend to forms, to notice transformation over time, and to understand the natural world as a field of living relationships.

At the heart of the piece is a call to rethink ecology as a discipline of perception, one that may help us respond more fully to the crises of the present.

Read the full essay here: https://shorturl.at/CR147

Ryan Shea is a researcher and educator at The Nature Institute in Ghent, New York. His work focuses on phenomenological ecology, with particular attention to plants, insects, and the practice of learning from nature.

In March 2026, the Center for the Study of World Religions hosted Tracy Pintchman for the annual Hindu View of Life Lect...
06/25/2026

In March 2026, the Center for the Study of World Religions hosted Tracy Pintchman for the annual Hindu View of Life Lecture. Her talk examined how Hindu traditions have been reinterpreted and remade in the United States, focusing on the Parashakthi Temple in Pontiac, Michigan.

A century after Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan described Hinduism as “a growing tradition,” Pintchman explored how Hindu immigrant communities continue to carry that vision into new cultural, religious, and geographic contexts. At the Parashakthi Temple, the Hindu Goddess has been reimagined in a Midwestern setting, reflecting both the community’s Indian roots and its life within an American cultural, religious, and natural world.

Watch the recording: https://shorturl.at/lyb1D

Tracy Pintchman is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Global Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago. A scholar of Hindu traditions, gender, and diaspora, she is the author of Goddess Beyond Boundaries: Worshipping the Eternal Mother at a North American Hindu Temple.

In the 2025–26 academic year, the Center for the Study of World Religions hosted Susannah Heschel for the annual List Le...
06/23/2026

In the 2025–26 academic year, the Center for the Study of World Religions hosted Susannah Heschel for the annual List Lecture. Her talk, titled “Forging the Monotheistic Triangle: Jews, Arabs, Christians and the Promises of European Modernity,” examined how Jews, Arabs, and Christians encountered the promises and limits of European modernity in the nineteenth century.

Heschel traced parallel histories of aspiration and disillusionment, showing how Jewish and Arab thinkers drew on the languages of science, rationalism, reform, and universalism, even as Europe refused to recognize them as full participants in the Enlightenment’s universal subject.

Moving beyond conventional accounts of Orientalism, colonialism, and anti-Judaism, Heschel reconsidered the desires, anxieties, and theological imaginaries that shaped how these communities envisioned their place in a modern world.

Watch the recording: https://shorturl.at/asD8s

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and a leading scholar of Jewish and Protestant thought, biblical scholarship, and antisemitism.

What happens when psychedelic pop, religious imagination, Elephant 6, and the mysticism of mathematics come together?Epi...
06/18/2026

What happens when psychedelic pop, religious imagination, Elephant 6, and the mysticism of mathematics come together?

Episodes 21 and 22 of Pop Apocalypse features Matt Dillon in conversation with Robert Schneider. Schneider is a musician, producer, mathematician, lead singer of The Apples in Stereo, and co-founder of The Elephant 6 Recording Co.

Across this two-part interview, Matt and Robert discuss Schneider’s religious upbringing, the mystical dimensions of Elephant 6, and the Beach Boys as a spiritual and artistic influence. They also discuss the unfinished third Olivia Tremor Control record, Robert’s journey from music into mathematics, Pythagoras, Ramanujan, and how number theory speaks to a central concern in the history of philosophy: the one and the many.

Watch here:

Episode 21: Spirituality and The Elephant 6 Collective with Robert Schneider
https://shorturl.at/pgQgN

Episode 22: Exploring the Mysticism of Mathematics with Robert Schneider
https://shorturl.at/Apx6B

Full Pop Apocalypse playlist:
https://shorturl.at/P8M5g

Pop Apocalypse explores the mystical and the mythic, the paranormal and the psychedelic in popular culture. Hosted by Matthew J. Dillon, with music by Secret Chiefs 3, the podcast brings artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and scholars into conversation about religion and popular culture.

Francesco Piraino explores how the Muridiyya, a Senegalese Sufi order founded by Shaykh Amadou Bamba, reimagines Africa,...
06/16/2026

Francesco Piraino explores how the Muridiyya, a Senegalese Sufi order founded by Shaykh Amadou Bamba, reimagines Africa, Africanness, and Blackness as expansive spiritual horizons.

Through the work of two contemporary Senegalese-Italian artists, Moulaye Niang and Maïmouna Guerresi, Piraino shows how Murid spirituality offers a powerful vision of “Universal Blackness” as a horizon for inclusive humanism, artistic devotion, and multiracial global community.

For these artists, art is not simply a way to represent Islam. It is a way to live, embody, and transmit spiritual presence.

Read the full Research Reflection: https://shorturl.at/kwWg3

What did “Aryavarta” come to mean in the nineteenth century?In a recent research reflection, Marina Alexandrova examines...
06/10/2026

What did “Aryavarta” come to mean in the nineteenth century?

In a recent research reflection, Marina Alexandrova examines the revival of an ancient Sanskrit term that came to signify far more than a geographical region in northern India.

The essay traces how Aryavarta was taken up by the Theosophical Society, especially Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, and considers the Society’s early alliance with Swami Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj. It shows how competing visions of Aryavarta shaped debates over Vedic authority, Hindu reform, anti-colonial thought, and universal religion.

Read the full essay: https://shorturl.at/dNwvN

For Michael Prettyman, inspiration does not arrive as command or certainty. It comes through rupture, pressure, resistan...
06/04/2026

For Michael Prettyman, inspiration does not arrive as command or certainty. It comes through rupture, pressure, resistance, and release.

In a recent Research Reflection, Prettyman turns to dehiscence, the splitting open of a fruit, seedpod, wound, or form, to think about artistic making and apophatic mysticism. In the studio, he suggests, images often emerge where control begins to give way: strange presences enter seascapes, landscapes catch fire, and the work insists on forms the artist did not intend.

To paint, here, is not simply to compose an image, but to allow an opening to occur. As Prettyman writes, “It loves to happen.”

Read the full reflection here: https://shorturl.at/jr7MU

On April 2, 2026, the Center for the Study of World Religions hosted a book talk with Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Pr...
06/02/2026

On April 2, 2026, the Center for the Study of World Religions hosted a book talk with Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, in celebration of the publication of Henry David Thoreau: Living Disobediently (Oxford University Press, 2024).

In his talk, Buell reflected on the aims and arguments of his new book before joining Charles Stang, Director, CSWR, for a conversation and questions from the audience.

The event honored Buell’s foundational contributions to the study of Transcendentalism and to American literary and cultural history more broadly, while reflecting on Thoreau’s legacy and the future of Transcendentalism studies.

Watch the conversation here: https://shorturl.at/hXLeR

Address

42 Francis Avenue
Cambridge, MA
02138

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+16174954495

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category