What do you want to be when you grow up?
What will you do after graduation?
What’s your career path?
What’s your plan?
My students hear these questions and their many variants almost daily from a constellation of mentors: teachers, parents, coaches, elders, and other well-meaning adults. These questions lurk in the background as they grapple with the A- that they fear will drop their grade point average and make medical school admission a far-off dream, or as they ponder just how much AI they can reasonably use as they rush to finish a research paper before turning to other assignments imminently due. This mindset determines how students discern the most lucrative summer internship option—“Should I intern with McKinsey, Meta, or Palantir this summer?”— or just the right volunteering opportunity that will allow them to remain buoyant against the undertows of the demands of accomplishment and attainment. Most often, these questions are asked not directly by any one person, but seemingly absorbed by osmosis through the amorphous matrices of digital culture endlessly available with the flick of a thumb—TikTok reels and Snapchat stories of influencers basking in performative success, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels showcasing the ersatz wonders of a life of social capital built on finely-tuned attention mills. From all directions, young people today face the brunt of a constant barrage of variegated calls for them to attain, succeed, perform, accomplish, secure, advance, and do.
Despite it all, my students admit that something is missing; despite the world at their fingertips and the relative comforts that globalized capital has provided unevenly to many swaths of the world, scores of students identify an unnamable, implacable dissatisfaction that runs just under the surface of their affairs—a thin thread of disquiet under the achievements, a hollowness that remains even after the college admissions letter or job placement offers are secured, a root of despair that doesn’t seem to dislodge. I have heard students use different adjectives to describe the sensation—a hollowness, an emptiness, a hunger, and an itch.
Zachary Davis, in his recent Wayfare article The Four Horsemen of New Theism, offers a sobering and unignorable diagnosis: things have gone terribly wrong with our civilization. Along with Davis, a diverse chorus of scholars and philosophers have sounded the alarm on our civilizational course, ranging from Charles Taylor’s evaluation of the secular age,1 to Seyyid Hossein Nasr’s analysis of the loss of integral cosmology in the modern world,2 to David Abram’s call for a more interdependent ecology of the more-than-human-world.3 These varied analyses suggest that we are approaching the limits of the now-globalized, post-Enlightenment worldview and confronting the anthropological, epistemological, and cosmological voids it has left behind. In signaling a shift, the era’s trend of declining religiosity appears to be slowing and, in some cases, reversing. In its wake, a growing thirst for religious experience and spiritual encounter stirs.
Davis suggests this is a moment of re-enchantment. Amidst so much chaos and uncertainty, there is a greater yearning for a new story and for a new way of seeing—and being in—the world. We are looking for a narrative that will bridge the incoherence of contemporary culture with the depths of our intuitions, aspirations, and inner experience. Davis and his interlocutors offer a compellingly sober analysis of our situation. The next logical question, of course, is—now what?
For those of us eager to roll up our sleeves and work to build, in ways great or small, a better world—one that is more just, joyful, caring, beautiful, virtuous, wise, and receptive to mystery—what are we to do? Where does the work of re-enchantment begin? Whether we agree with those like Paul Kingsnorth who suggest Western civilization cannot be salvaged and that we must begin anew or we agree with those like Rod Dreher and see potential for civilizational rehabilitation, we will wake up tomorrow and grapple at first light with the question—how will I work, today, to build a re-enchanted world?
As a scholar of comparative religions, I believe that we can only rejuvenate Western culture to the extent we grow from our inheritance of intellectual, religious, and spiritual diversity. In the twenty-first century, the West is home to new communities of indigenous Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and other communities that exist and thrive at the intersection of multiple epistemic commitments. Re-enchantment ought not aim for perceived cultural purity, but rather—perhaps more essentially—for a shared, multi-polar vision of the human capacity for transcendence. A rehabilitation or reemergence will require both recovery and expansion—a return to origins that also honors the gifts and wisdom gained through all that has been encountered and learned along the way. T.S. Eliot captures this beautifully in the lines:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. In all cases, it will be the duty of future generations—equipped with whatever tools, visions, insights, and questions we may offer them—to continue the work of re-enchantment after we are gone. A sense of re-enchantment must first animate how we teach the rising generations.
I teach religion, ethics, and philosophy across several institutions of secondary and higher education in the United States. As a doctoral student in the Study of Religion, I chose this path with the commitment to becoming a scholar-teacher of the world’s religious traditions, particularly Islamic, Buddhist, and Catholic contemplative traditions. If my scholarship is concerned with the work of intellectually grappling with re-enchantment, my work as a teacher is to make the possibilities of re-enchantment intelligible and meaningful to broadly capable and diverse yet equally disquieted and existentially-thirsty audiences. Following the essential pedagogical inspiration of the Buddha’s teaching of the dharma, wisdom and insight are framed and delivered in myriad ways depending on capacity, language, and context. Each person, regardless of their capabilities, may receive the dharma; any good pedagogy is adaptable, fluid, and responsive. The re-enchanted world will only be built if we explore, consider, and teach the structures on which it may be built. This essay, too, stands at a juncture between scholarship and pedagogy, between formulating a sober intellectual diagnosis and demonstrably articulating its needs and value for a wider audience.
As a teacher of both high school and college students, I often think about the precarity of the current moment. Besides general and valid concerns of professional teachers being under resourced, under compensated, and under appreciated by students, parents, and the broader culture, teachers stand on the frontlines as translators and interpreters of an uncertain and confusing world. Teachers are generally left to their own devices in the work of molding coherent selves in a world that feels increasingly fragmented; each morning millions of teachers across the country must wake and discern how to best model, to absorptive and observant minds, how to be coherent beings in an often-incoherent world. The work of training young minds how to think, act, and be in the world, in society, in a nation, and in communities often seems an insurmountable task.
Despite the precarity, I also find hope in this moment’s potential for cultural re-enchantment. Teaching has a central and immediate role in turning these philosophical ideas into meaningful cultural, personal, and civilizational change. Teaching is a sacred vocation. The most apt image of a teacher, in my mind, is that of a fire kindler—either the tender of a simple deep-woodland campfire on a cool autumn evening or of a Zoroastrian athravan, a guardian of the temple fire. Teachers are tenders of the fire of wonder, those who guard and tend the holy fire of that which is essential for our survival in the long, cool, dark night of the modern world. Teachers are not charged with teaching students what to think, but the many ways of how one may think. As a teacher of religion, I do not see my role as that of a proselytizer seeking to convince students of a particular intellectual system or cosmological vision. Instead, I strive to create encounters that kindle their inner sense of wonder. That wonder may arise through my attempts to convey the zeal of a Sufi dhikr, the peace of moral certitude in an ethical case study, or the ungraspable clarity of insight cultivated in zazen meditation. Which tradition or experience resonates is ultimately up to the students themselves and whatever chord of longing it awakens within them. My pedagogical work, then, is the sacred art of tending wonder: inviting students to linger in the mystery and beauty of the world, and offering enough kindling for the next stage of their journey. Most importantly, our work lies in teaching students how to renew their own fuel so they may sustain their fire for the journeys that yet lie ahead long after they have left my classes.
In the work of wonder-tending, I see as essential the cultivation of a new anthropology that shifts a student’s primary focus from occupational and production-oriented ontological measures of one’s worth in the world to an ontology of a wonder, humility, and awe whose fruits are delight and joy. This calls for a multi-polar anthropology which draws on shared wisdom of the new ecumenical, multicultural, and interreligious context of Western civilization and on cross-cultural intuitions of our human capacity for transcendence and re-enchantment.4 It is an anthropology that shifts the metric upon which we build out worldview from what do you want to do? to how are you going to be?
To this end, in my work as a teacher, I have tried to shift to new variants of the questions above when I teach or mentor students, such as:
What is the quality by which you want to be known by your grandchildren and neighbors?
What kind of home do you want to inhabit when you are older?
How do you want to be?
Most of these questions indicate a subtle but necessary shift towards a new anthropological vision—from product-oriented beings to process-oriented beings, and a shift from gaining understanding to gaining wonder and its fruits of humility, delight, and openness. It is a shift from the dominant post-Enlightenment anthropology of doing, towards a re-enchanted anthropology of being.
At different institutions of secondary and higher learning, I have attempted to enact a pedagogy of re-enchantment in different ways. In this essay, I share examples and notes for an emergent pedagogical philosophy of re-enchantment. The examples highlighted here are taken from courses on (1) creativity, (2) happiness, (3) Zen Buddhism, and (4) interreligious readings of sacred texts. My work, as all our work, is necessarily partial and interdependent with the efforts of others committed to a radical reimagination of a post-Enlightenment civilization as we work in different ways—whether in governance, in therapy and healthcare, in sustainable construction, in architecture, or in other ways—to building a different world. Here, I only offer several embers of pedagogical possibility in this moment of re-enchantment.
The Vital Spark: Cultivating Integral Creativity
In a college-level class called Creativity,5 our investigation was guided by a simple yet profound question—what is creativity, what are its limits, and from where does it come? From neuroscience to philosophy to biology to religion, we spent a term together exploring various perspectives on the origins, functions, flourishing, and ends of creativity. Each week, students were tasked with at least one creative assignment which offered an opportunity to integrate free creative generation with thoughtful analytical review. Taught from January to May 2023, the course was taught during the emergence of generative AI as an accessible resource that, in hindsight, opened up radical, novel concerns that our civilization is still grappling with—in a world where robots can write poetry, what is the use of human creativity? Rather than remaining removed from the technology or disengaging, we took a bold first step by testing the early technology to see if it could, in fact, match the products of human creativity At the time, ChatGPT couldn’t generate a convincing Japanese haiku, interpret a poem by Rumi, or produce a short story that combined the authorial voices of Jorge Luise Borges and Ernest Hemingway into a strange new narrative synthesis. While the capabilities of AI tools have expanded exponentially since this course was offered, and while our once-impossible prompts now seem firmly within the realm of generative AI’s capabilities, many remain unsettled and unconvinced that the creativity of generative AI can fundamentally supplant human creative production.
Interestingly, most students in Creativity were not humanities-oriented students. They were concentrators in STEM or STEM-adjacent fields such as computer science, engineering, economics, or pre-med. In office hours, students usually spoke about their lack of personal interest in their major fields of study, but that they “had to” study what they were studying, either because of parental encouragement or because of the lure of a financially lucrative career after graduation. Such decisions are haunting many recent and current computer science concentrators in light of AI’s ascendance. In Creativity, students were ecstatic to be liberated from problem sets or papers that felt rote, and instead instructed to simply create—poems, songs, visuals, scores, portraits, riddles, koans, and much more. They found in Creativity what they had been largely denied in the studies they pursued for economic advancement—the liberation of the creative act from the demands of a product, the play of exploration without having to rush to a destination, and the joy of unexpected connections in trying new mediums of art.
Many theologians and philosophers have reflected on the human necessity for creation, arguing it is the core of our ontological hardwiring.6 Catholic theologians reflect on the human vocation as creators who mirror, in their labor and craft, of the Divine act of creation. The Sufi tradition discusses the theophanic potential of humans who mirror and enact beautification, order, and sanctification through our creative endeavors. Other traditions such as qi gong and yogic systems intuit the connection between creativity and subtle energy channels of the human body. When authentic human creation is stifled and stagnant, we become blocked, frustrated, and flustered in ways which manifest as depression, anxiety, abuse, and dismay. Without nurturing the vital spark and flow of our propensity for creation and creative inquiry, we enter into a state of fundamental fragmentation, a dis-integration which manifests in manifold experiences of anxiety, depression, and mental dis-ease.
What Creativity offered as a node of pedagogical wisdom is a reminder that the work of teaching in any subject or field necessarily begins in the invitation to exploration, play, and experimentation detached from the goals of financial, status, or career gain. Many contemporary educational systems have conflated the goals of creative, synthetic education with career training, much to our civilizational detriment. If we are to enact a collective shift to a re-enchanted anthropology, teachers must begin by encouraging a creative attitude which eventually inculcates a disposition of awe in realizing the limits of one’s personal experience in a world that is always changing, charged with mystery, and beautifully and ever becoming something more than what it currently is. This vital spark is the core of human experience, and it is a teacher’s duty, in the work of re-enchantment, to do what we can to preserve and encourage it in our students’ lives, self-discovery, and self-recovery.
Happiness and Its Many Roads: Centering Meaning and Its Making
At the secondary level, I design and teach a class that is simply called Happiness. In this class, we explore how different cultures and societies have conceived of the notion of happiness and framed the well-lived life. Like Creativity, Happiness is wildly popular among students and a choice elective. Such a class seems to offer some reprieve or hope for a rightly anxious group of students wondering what the world will be like when they are adults. Over the course of our class, students quickly learn that definitions and models of happiness or a well-lived life are not universal across time, space, and culture. We begin by considering the contingency of our contemporary positionality as twenty-first century American students living in a context of globalization and retracing our steps from the present day to the American Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Age of Empire, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and all the way to the various civilizational streams of Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, the Arabic translation movement, and Greco-Roman philosophy that have given rise to our context. This truncated but necessary roadmap of intellectual history has a singular goal of demonstrating that we live in the context of historical contingency and that our expectations of a well-lived life are far from universal. For many students, it is a liberating opening to understanding that the structures, frameworks, and expectations that define most of their lives are not sacrosanct. We then move to an exploration of major concepts and frameworks, endeavoring a cross-cultural consideration of concepts such as the Greek eudaimonia, Buddhist dharma, Islamic fitrah, Christian vocation, Hindu sat-chit-ananda, and Japanese ikigai. Through keeping a daily gratitude journal and a weekly ikigai journal, students are encouraged to deeply consider the structures that form their sense of “living well” and to consider all the possible alternatives at this pivotal juncture in their formation.
What Happiness offers is an invitation to root our students in a more contextual understanding of our positionality that liberates and invites students to consider what it could mean to live into an anthropology of process, becoming, and being. An essential task of the wonder-tenders in the work of re-enchantment will be to remind students of the ultimate fruits of human life—a contextual and holistic conceptualization of the human person that exists beyond one’s performance, financial status, or job. Whether it’s framed as one’s ikigai, eudaimonia, dharma, or vocation, such frameworks allow students to find their greater story beyond the goals of a paycheck, a house, or a summer home in the Hamptons. Such frameworks, of course, don’t demonize or degrade the pursuit of career success and wealth, but contextualize these pursuits within an expanded network of concerns and relationships. Our teaching must be rooted in the invitation of our students to contextual, holistic, and broader perspectives.
Such efforts build, at the grassroots, the foundation of an anthropology of re-enchantment. I have already seen tangible, hopeful fruits of this pedagogical experiment. One Happiness student who was previously scheduled for a summer internship at an investment bank is now bound for a guided summer monastic retreat (likely to the horror of their parents, my apologies!), and another student has started the necessary training to be a meditation teacher as the result of their gratitude and ikigai journaling. Civilizational shifts begin in these small, personal shifts of awareness, focus, and intent. It begins with a re-orientation of one’s vision.
Dwelling in Questions, Decentering Answers: Inspiring a Wayfaring Mind
At both the secondary and college level, I have designed courses on East Asian Ways of Knowing: Zen Buddhism. The course is a survey of broader Mahayana and specifically Zen Buddhist traditions. Such a course poses a core pedagogical challenge. How does one teach Zen Buddhist epistemology—which prizes direct, lived realization unhindered by conceptualizations—within the radically different and confining structures of a course in Western academic institutions which demand examination, performance, and evaluation? This has become a concentrated adventure in venturing a way forward in light of much broader concerns surrounding disciplinary fragmentation and knowledge integration in contemporary higher education. It calls for a reckoning and has encouraged me to consider alternatives modes of evaluation, drawing on models such as the Islamic mahdarah system of Mauritania which offers more intimate models of teacher-student transmission and peer-to-peer collaborative learning or Buddhist systems of dharma transmission to measure whether or not students have reliably progressed in a course focused on cultivating the path and conditions of meditative realization.
In such classes, I give students a simple maxim: inhabit the questions; don’t seek the answers. Through introductions to various “technologies of contemplation” such as calm-abiding meditation, walking meditation, koan meditation and composition, qi gong, and zazen, students are encouraged to focus on the process of discovery, lingering to consider the unfolding nuances, textures, and layers of observation, thought, and perception emerging during the course. Introductions to Buddhist ethics and cosmology also offer helpful opportunities to introduce students to the possibilities of a re-enchanted anthropology. For example, after exploring the classic Mahayana concept of the bodhisattva, a being who chooses to remain in the cycle of reincarnation until all beings, through their service, have attained liberation, I reframe the question of “What do you want to do when you grow up?” as:
Imagine you accepted the vow of the bodhisattva. How would you exist to spread liberatory loving-kindness to all beings?
The maxim of focusing on the process rather than discerning answers can be a helpful exercise in courses beyond East Asian Ways of Knowing and is a helpful pedagogical process for opening new insights for students.
Dreaming Beyond Canon(s) and Culture(s): Towards a Dia-logos of Imaginal Horizons
I regularly design and offer college-level classes in a series titled Sacred Texts in Dialogue: Reading Interreligiously. Inspired in part by the Great Books approach to learning, these courses are devoted to teaching some of the great classics of world religious literature. Rather than teaching and reading a single text, however, we put two seminal texts into unconventional cross-cultural, interreligious conversations. We may read Rumi’s Persian Sufi Masnavi with Shantideva’s Mahayana Buddhist Way of the Bodhisattva, asking questions such as, what would Rumi make of Shantideva, or Shantideva of Rumi? What would a Sufi make of calm-abiding meditative practices or the Buddhist or Sufi practices of invocatory litanies? What might be an Islamic reading of a Buddhist text, or a Buddhist reading of an Islamic text? In other versions, we may read Dante’s Comedia in conversation with ‘Attar’s Conference of the Birds, Valmiki’s Ramayana with Homer’s Odyssey, or the Book of Psalms and the Heart Sutra.
Courses like Sacred Texts expressly embody one of the essential tasks of the teacher—the opening and expansion of a student’s imaginal horizons. The solutions to our civilizational crises will not arise from the same structures from which the crises were born; solutions most often arise from unexpected convergences, innovative approaches, and insights deep within which emerge only from what Emily Dickinson calls new and “certain Slant[s] of light” which reveal new layers and dimensions to the challenges that face us. Sacred Texts is an exercise in innovative problem-solving through cross-cultural reading and reasoning. The work of wonder-tending calls for suggesting not only fresh answers for our students to consider but also new questions for our students to live into.
These courses emphasize imaginal dialogue. I use imaginal in an expansive way suggested by Mark Vernon in his recent Wayfare article Awake—and also found in the works of scholars such as Henry Corbin and the Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi—not in the sense of something ephemeral, secondary, or distracting, but profoundly real, an exercise of visionary capability that expands realms of what we think is real or possible. The work of re-enchantment entails a reprisal and rehabilitation of this understanding of the imaginal and its many implications for new possibilities in art, politics, communal life, and beyond. Imaginal horizons in a globalized, diverse age also entails a deep commitment to dialogue as dia-logos, what Catholic theologian Raimon Panikkar calls not a dialectical duet of two logoi in debate, but a piercing or breaking through of the logos, a movement not of but through rational formulations so that something truer than either side’s conceptual scheme may emerge between the partners.7 Truth-seeking becomes an interdependent relationality rooted in partnership rather than an intellectual conquest. Such a dia-logical spirit must be at the core of the work of re-enchantment, and it is the primary project of Sacred Texts.
We see elements of this necessary expansion of imaginal horizons in the increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary programs and studies at the college and graduate level. Students and educators are finding that innovative solutions can be found not only within traditional disciplinary boundaries but also at the unexplored avenues of disciplinary dialogue—where Tibetan Buddhist monks are in conversation with neuroscientists about cognitive health, Shipibo Icaro interpreters discuss plant sentience with ethnobotanists, and where physicists, musicians, and Hindu swamis consider the transformative nature and creational potential of sound, vibration, and speech. Education should be dia-logical, drawing on the vast array of resources which define our world, working towards new, richer, more colorful, more expensive conceptual horizons that can help us think about things like virtue, belonging, honor, justice, and environmental stewardship. Learning to read dia-logically allows us to learn new ways of seeing to find creative solutions in a complex, changing, world. Each new encounter becomes humbling, wondrous, and revelatory.
Inculcating Technologies of Contemplation: Teaching the Student Whole
In my senior year of high school, our English teacher tasked us with memorizing, collectively, a new line of poetry each day at the start of class. At the time, I begrudged the process and did not understand the value of rote memorization, a common pedagogical practice found in other cultural systems that has long been devalued in the West, but I still carry those poems with me today, decades later. I only now see the wisdom of this practice. Both memorization and contemplative practice are virtually absent in contemporary Western pedagogical models. A common practice that unites my four pedagogical experiments detailed above is a commitment to introducing students to experiences of ritual, routine, repetition, rhythm, and regular practice. What Michael Foucault calls “technologies of the self” can be found in many religious traditions as something I call “technologies of contemplation,” those tools which focus on inner cultivation of perception, presence, and introspection that readies students for the work of analysis, connection, dialogue, and evaluation. Whether it’s the lectio divina of Christian monastic traditions or the wird and dhikr of Sufi traditions or the darshan of Hindu traditions, technologies of contemplation are a cornerstone of inculcating an attitude of wonder.
In East Asian Ways of Knowing, students keep a daily meditation practice and journal, and in Happiness students keep a gratitude journal rooted in daily reflection. In Creativity, students engage in a daily creative exercise to mirror the artist’s daily commitment to their craft, and in Sacred Texts students memorize lines from the texts they engage dialogically. These are efforts not only to teach the whole student—to tend to both their intellectual and inner dimensions—but to teach the student whole, to offer them models and pathways for the integration of knowledge and wisdom, to work for the reintegration of a student and their perception, reflection, and intellect in a system and setting of disintegration. This reintegration is at the core of pedagogy in the work of re-enchantment.
Conclusion
The elements of an emergent, integral pedagogy of re-enchantment include (1) tending the vital spark of creative inquiry that is at the core of the learning experience; (2) shaping our curricula in light of a more holistic anthropology that orients our students to the quest for meaning rather than the attainment of an occupation; (3) encouraging students to inhabit questions, to root in process over product, and to linger in the journey rather than rush to answers, conclusions, or goals; (4) stepping outside of frameworks and canons and into a dia-logos that allows new questions, answers, and approaches to emerge organically; and (5) introducing students to the technologies of contemplation which allows for an anthropological and epistemological re-integration in a current system marked by fragmentation, incoherence, and disintegration. These, I hope, would converge in the ultimate cultivation of essential wonder—awe, humility, and hope in the understanding that there is more than meets the eye, and that beauty and virtue remain within our grasp despite the disintegration, incoherence, and fragmentation which seems to surround us.
I often remind my students that there is nothing particularly remarkable about being a teacher. Each of us is and will be a teacher, even if some do it in ways that are more structured and offer a means of sustenance. Each of us is called to the vocation of teaching, of tending the sacred fires of wonder, and of re-enchantment. At some point, and more likely at many points, we serve as teachers for others. We teach our children, our friends, our spouses, our parents, our colleagues, and perhaps most beautifully, utter strangers in unexpected moments—a door held open despite the rush of the day, a soft smile in a grocery store line that breaks through the weariness, a warm touch of reassurance on the palm. Fire asks little more than a thin thread of kindling for it to blaze; hope asks little more than a glimmer of endurance and persistence. I remind my students that if we all commit in ways great and small to the vocation of wonder-tending, then the whole world, soon enough, will blaze with edifying radiance. From the embers of these intuitions and efforts, a great blaze may emerge.
Echoing Davis’ sober pronouncement once again: things, somewhere, have gone terribly wrong with our civilization. We seemingly teeter on a precipice and a descent into chaos. We can choose to linger in our despair and incoherence and brace for impact and collapse. Alternatively, we can stoke the embers of those intuitions that wonder promises us–that something far greater awaits us in the possibility of re-enchantment. I am hopeful that teachers have an essential role to play in this moment, even if we go unrecognized and uncelebrated by dominant cultural matrices. Many times over from Rome to Baghdad to Alexandria and beyond, worlds have ended, and many more times over, worlds have been rebuilt. At each juncture, humans have survived, persisted, and flourished. I take heart in the invitation and opportunity for re-enchantment, and the ways we may be able to enact this shift together, being as trickling droplets of water falling on sturdy rock bed, shaping, with each small act of wonder-tending a path for living waters to flow and nourish the valleys below and beyond, even if such erosions and transformations remain imperceptible to us in this moment, within the limited gaze of this short, precious, and wondrous life.
Peter Dziedzic is a PhD candidate in Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies at Harvard University, where he is finishing his dissertation on Kashmiri and Persian Sufi poetry. He is also working on a comparative study of walking pilgrimages around the world. He is currently an instructor in Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and has recently served as the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Study of Religion at Harvard University and as a professor in Religious and Islamic World Studies at DePaul University.
Art by Karl Wiener. 1901-1949.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man. Chicago: Kazi Publications, 2007.
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
I explore a cross-cultural ontology of joy in an upcoming Substack essay on “the ecstasy of existence” in Islamic, Catholic, and Kashmir Shaiva philosophy.
For this class I was not the primary instructor, but a graduate teaching fellow.
See, for example, the works of Malcolm Guite, Michael Martin, and Ibn ‘Arabi.
Panikkar, Raimon. The Intrareligious Dialogue. Rev. ed. New York: Paulist Press, 1999.
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