What is Contemplation?

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).