Perspective
Making a Space for ‘Alternative Spiritualities’
By Dan Mckanan
Harvard Divinity School’s program for the Evolution of Spirituality (PES) seeks to create a new space of dialogue for practitioners, scholars, and critics of emerging and marginalized spiritual movements. For the past two generations, such scholarly subfields as “new religious movements,” “Western esotericism,” and “pagan studies” have grown rapidly, producing an abundance of textual, historical, and ethnographic studies. Few scholars of religion can imagine today that their field was once limited to five or six major traditions.
Yet the academy still provides very few spaces where adherents of small traditions can do what Christians have been doing for centuries: bringing their full selves to school, studying their traditions in ways that are equally accountable to internal doctrinal or liturgical norms and to the critical standards of the academy. There are even fewer spaces for persons who have been harmed by alternative spiritualities to wrestle with the harms they have suffered.
When the Divinity School committed to offering a fully multireligious master of divinity curriculum about 20 years ago, we expected to see an increasing number of Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu students. That has certainly been the case. But we have also been blessed by steadily growing numbers of pagans, animists, readers of the Urantia Book or A Course in Miracles, practitioners of entheogenic or queer or African diasporic spiritualities, seekers, and people who affiliate with two, three, or more traditions. This diversity poses challenges, since we cannot possibly offer courses in every tradition to which our students belong. But it also invites us to reimagine both religion and the practice of ministry.
In 2015, an unusual endowment gift enabled us to be more intentional about serving the needs of alternative spiritual practitioners. The Endowment for the Evolution of Spirituality is designed to “enhance the scholarly study of, and the preparation of students interested in ministering in, emerging spiritual movements, marginalized spiritualities, and the innovative edges of established religious traditions.” Already this fund has supported student field trips to such spiritual communities as Camphill Village USA in New York and the Metta Earth Institute in Vermont, as well as field education placements with such organizations as Queer Muslims of Boston and the Poor People’s Campaign.
From the beginning, we have also aspired to build a mutually supportive community of scholars, spiritual practitioners, artists, and activists from beyond our campus. We chose “Ecological Spiritualities” as the theme for the PES community’s inaugural conference because we believe that deep connection to the living earth is one of the few forces that can unite us without diminishing our diversity. We were enormously gratified by the response to our call for papers, which attracted more than a hundred papers, panels, and workshops on everything from neopaganism to spiritual eco-villages to the spirituality of weeds.
We were especially delighted that many of the papers came from scholars and activists committed to the revival of Indigenous spiritualities in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Though we initially thought of Indigenous spirituality as distinct from “emerging spirituality,” we quickly came to see that one of the most important expressions of spiritual emergence today is the work Indigenous communities are doing to defend threatened ecosystems through spiritual practice. The articles featured in this issue represent a small sample of the many perspectives that were shared at the conference.
One of the most important expressions of spiritual emergence today is the work Indigenous communities are doing to defend threatened ecosystems through spiritual practice.
We initially planned to hold an ecological spiritualities preconference in spring 2020, followed by a full-scale conference in spring 2021, but this plan was revised multiple times as the pandemic took its unpredictable course. When we finally gathered in spring 2022, we used a hybrid format, with about 70 people present on campus and hundreds more Zooming in from around the world. We had a fabulous team of media services staff, as well as student employees and volunteers, all of us learning together how to cultivate deep community on both sides of the Zoom screen. Participants especially appreciated the James Room’s panoramic view of the outdoors in our newly renovated Swartz Hall.
Many conference participants came away from HDS with a desire for ongoing connection, and to fill that need we have created three ongoing working groups that meet about once a month over Zoom. Our assistant director, Zia Pollis, leads the group “Alternative Spiritualities and the Arts,” program coordinator Owen Yager leads “The Past and Future in Alternative Spiritualities,” and the group “Indigenous Religious Traditions” is coordinated by Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato and Delores Mondragón. Anyone interested in these groups should reach out to us at pes@hds.harvard.edu or go to our website and sign up for our newsletter.
As this issue goes to press, we are preparing for our second conference, on the theme “Uses and Abuses of Power in Alternative Spiritualities.” Some people experience alternative spiritualities as remarkably empowering. Spiritual practice can help us recover from childhood trauma or connect to dimensions of ourselves that may have been neglected in mainstream religion. But spiritual movements can also be disempowering. Sexual misconduct is as widespread in alternative communities as in mainstream religious ones, and some alternative movements seek total control of their members’ lives or isolate them from friends and family. Building on a series of virtual events we’ve held over the past few years, our conference will seek to give voice to these diverse realities, helping practitioners and scholars forge more nuanced and also more prophetic and courageous analyses of power.
As we explore additional themes, we will never forget that “Ecological Spiritualities” was the first fruit of our shared work. Please enjoy the many luscious tastes of the articles in this issue!
Dan McKanan is Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity at HDS and faculty director of the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality.
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