2025-2026 Working Groups
2025-2026 Working Groups
The Program for the Evolution of Spirituality is pleased to announce six working groups for the 2025-2026 academic year. These groups are designed to advance our mission of supporting the scholarly study of emerging spiritual movements, marginalized spiritualities, and the innovative edges of established religious traditions. By addressing a diverse range of interrelated topics, we aim to foster a collaborative community of practitioners working at the intersections of scholarly, creative, and spiritual work.
While each group orbits around our upcoming 2026 conference, Belonging, their scope extends well beyond the event. Sign-ups for these working groups will begin in September 2025, and interested participants are welcome to join multiple groups to engage in the dynamic interplay of offered topics. After the sign-up period, those interested in joining open groups can email pes@hds.harvard.edu for more information.
Schedule: Second Tuesdays of the month, 7PM ET Zoom & In-Person
Leader: Matthew Ceurvorst
In anticipation of the 2026 conference theme Belonging, this working group explores how spiritual communities and academic spaces define, disrupt, and reimagine belonging. Sessions will feature brief participant-led presentations, group discussion, and feedback on developing proposals. Topics may include boundaries of inclusion, scholar-practitioner identities, ecospiritual belonging, spiritual authority, and practices of repair after harm.This group aims to generate multiple collaborative proposals for the 2026 conference and to support one another’s work through regular conversation. Members may propose papers, workshops, or artistic offerings emerging from our shared inquiry.
Schedule: Every other Monday at 7:00 PM EST via Zoom. Starting September 29th.
Leader: Sadie Trichler
In light of the upcoming 100 Years Rudolf Steiner Conference, this working group will focus on Anthroposophy. It brings together individuals engaged with Anthroposophy in academic, artistic, and practice-based contexts. Over the past twenty years, scholarship on Steiner and Anthroposophy has grown significantly in both quality and quantity. The centennial of Steiner’s death in 1925 offers an ideal opportunity for scholars, practitioners of applied Anthroposophy such as Steiner education and biodynamic agriculture, and interested members of the public to come together and discuss key issues. Each session will include a brief introduction by PES staff, a featured presentation, and time for Q&A, group discussion, and feedback.
Schedule: Meetings are announced through email; please contact nataliaschwien@fas.harvard.edu to sign up.
Leader: Natalia Schwien Scott
This Working Group is an interdisciplinary community of scholars from the humanities, scientists, psychologists, professors, and students, all engaged with expanded understandings of personhood and agency. Our discussions center on posthuman ethics, relational ontologies, kinship-based science, and the implications of these themes for politics, ethics, culture, and religious experience. For the past seven years, we have regularly welcomed scholars from diverse fields, along with activists, writers, artists, and animacy practitioners, to share informal talks and lead workshop-style sessions. Additionally, several Center for the Study of World Religion speakers have been invited in connection with the group, such as David Abram, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Graham Harvey.
Schedule: Third Thursdays of the Month 12:30-2:00PM ET
Leader: Delores Mondragon
In an effort to foster an intentional circle focused on the continued centering of ecological spiritualities and Indigenous ways of life, we gather to support scholars and community members striving to include scholarship and ways of knowing often found on the margins. It is our intention to encourage presentations of works and conversations that align with this fostering and that will move them from the margins towards the center of this circle. As we encourage storytelling, testimonios, and other ways that mitigate hermeneutical injustice, we gather towards a place of belonging.
Schedule: Second Wednesdays of the month at 9:00 pm IST. Zoom.
Leader: Rituparna Das
In a world marked by wounds and despair, this working group brings together healers and artists who combine their creative and healing practices through music, somatic movement, writing, painting, sculpting, and other art forms used as therapeutic tools. Our aim is to explore new ideas and practical applications in real time while nurturing a vision of a healed planet and a brighter future.
This group studies the relationship between spirituality and healing as expressed through artistic practices. Across cultures and traditions—ranging from shamanism to yoga, from religious figures like Jesus and Buddha to contemporary healing arts—there is a recurring theme of healing at the heart of spirituality. We examine how the roles of artist and healer often overlap, with some individuals creating art as a form of healing and others using art to facilitate healing. Art becomes a medium through which spiritual ideas move beyond theory and become accessible in everyday life, whether through novels, music, rituals, or dance.
Schedule: January, 2026. 12-1pm ET. Zoom.
Leaders: Tristan Angieri and Bianca Padova
DEVOTION: Love Spells Broken is a reading group on the enchantments and fractures of love. We’ll trace its invention from ancient myth to courtly romance, its commodification under capitalism, and its unraveling in an age of burnout and infinite choice. Together we’ll consider: how does romantic love function as a religious or devotional practice; what does it mean to be devoted within the frame of romantic love; what does love bind us to; and what would it mean to widen the scope of romantic devotion beyond a romantic partner? DEVOTION’s remote discussion sessions will take place every Saturday in January, for a total of five sessions (1/3, 1/10, 1/17, 1/24, 1/31).