Interviews

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).