What is Contemplation?

JCS:  Thanks so much for talking with me today, James. First, we’re really interested in how your upbringing led to your being interested in contemplative practices and general spiritual openness.  JG: Yeah, that’s such a big question. For me, it was essentially a crisis—a real crisis of just growing up in a very difficult environment: a family…

Michael Sheehy is Research Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center at University of Virginia where he is Principal at CIRCL Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

Oludamini Ogunnaike is an Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (2020) and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (2020).

Conducted by Devin Zuckerman, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Contemplative Sciences Center. JCS: So, let’s begin with the first question: What is contemplation? YC: I come from a village called El Paraíso Coelhá, which translates to “the wonderlands of flowing waters” or “the flowing spring,” in the highlands of the cloud forests of Chiapas,…

Sonam Kachru is Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Yale University, specializing in the history of premodern South Asian philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on Buddhist philosophy. He is the author of Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism (2021).

Tanya Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, sometimes with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. She is the author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012) and How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (2020).

Marc-Henri Deroche is Associate Professor at Kyoto University, Japan, where he teaches Buddhist and Tibetan Studies and researches mindfulness in Buddhist philosophy, theories, and manuals of meditation. He is the author of A Tibetan Quest for Wisdom: Prajñāraśmi (1518–1584) and the Sources of the Impartial (ris med) Approach (2023), and issue editor for “Study, Reflection, and Cultivation: Integrative Paths to Wisdom from Buddhist and Comparative Perspectives” (Religions 2022) and “Tibetan Studies in Japan: Approaching the High Plateau from the Archipelago” (Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 2024).

Harold D. Roth is Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. He designed the first university concentration program in Contemplative Studies and is the author of The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism (2021). He is also on the executive committee of the International Society for Contemplative Research (ISCR).

Kevin Hart is the Jo Rae Wright University Professor in the Divinity School at Duke University. He is the author of Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (2023) and Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (2015).

John Dunne holds the Distinguished Chair of Contemplative Humanities in the Center for Healthy Minds and the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-author of The Mind (2020) and co-editor of Ecology, Ethics, and Interdependence: The Dalai Lama in Conversation with Leading Thinkers on Climate Change (2018).

Stephanie Paulsell is the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of Religion Around Virginia Woolf (2019) and co-editor of Goodness and the Literary Imagination (2019).

Eleanor Johnson is associate professor of English and comparative literature and director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. She is the author of Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England (2023).

Jordan Quaglia is Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Cognitive and Affective Science Laboratory, and Research Director of the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education at Naropa University.

Michael Chase is Senior Researcher at the Centre Jean Pépin of the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris-Villejuif, France and adjunct professor of Greek and Roman studies at the University of Victoria. He is the author and translator of Ammonius: Interpretation of Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Five Terms (2020).

Iya Funlayo E. Wood is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, Founding Director of the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association, and Guest Editor for Special Issue #05: Contemplation in Africana Traditions in the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

Ariel Evan Mayse is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, the senior scholar-in-residence at the Institute of Jewish Spirituality and Society, and an ordained rabbi. He is the author of Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (2024), Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (2020), and Guest Editor for the JCS Special Issue #03: Contemplative Ecology.

Julia Cassaniti is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community (2015).

Claire Petitmengin is Professor Emerita at the Institut Mines-Télécom and member of the Archives Husserl (Ecole Normale Supérieure) in Paris. Her research focuses on lived experience and micro-phenomenological methods enabling us to become aware of experience and describe it.

Erik Braun is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and author of The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (2014).

Muhammad Faruque is the Inayat Malik Assistant Professor and a Taft Center Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. He is the author of Sculpting the Self: Islam, Selfhood, and Human Flourishing (2021).

Anne C. Klein is a Professor in the Department of Religion at Rice University, co-founder of the Dawn Mountain Center for Tibetan Buddhism, and author of Being Human and a Buddha Too (2023).

Martijn van Beek is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University in Denmark. He specializes in ethnographic and phenomenological perspectives on meditation.

Loriliai Biernacki is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is the author of Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra (2007) and The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism (2023). She is also Co-Chair of the Contemplative Studies Unit at the American Academy of Religion.

David McMahan is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College and author of Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds (2023) and The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008).

Douglas Christie is a Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University and author of The Blue Saphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Love, Contemplative Practice, and the Common Life.