Swami Medhananda, A Hindu Vision of Religious Cosmopolitanism: Theologizing with Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required:
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The Center’s “Hindu View of Life Annual Lecture” evokes the memory of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s book of that title, which is comprised of his well-known 1926 lectures on “Religious Experience,” “The Conflict of Religions,” and two lectures on “Hindu Dharma.” The HVL Lecture aims to address constructively and for our era urgent issues of our time, from a perspective informed by insights and values arising from the Hindu traditions of India and Hinduism globally.
The Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) is perhaps most well known for having taught and practiced the dictum, “As many faiths, so many paths.” Far from affirming that all religions are the “same,” he held that various religions are different, but equally effective, paths to the common goal of the direct experiential knowledge of some aspect or form of one and the same impersonal-personal Infinite Divine. While some…
Programming Series: Transcendence and Transformation. Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, Event Coordinator
ldsedgwick@hds.harvard.edu
(617) 496 4476.
Monday, April 22, 2024, 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM.
CSWR, Common Room, 42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
For more info visit cswr.hds.harvard.edu. Reading Group: Microdosing Zarathustra (Every other Thu, beginning 2/1)
This reading group meets every other Thursday from 12-2pm beginning February 1, 2024.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is many things—poetry, polemic, philosophy, even farce. Its author, Friedrich Nietzsche, called Zarathustra a “holy book” or “fifth gospel,” something he was incapable of reading even a single page of without bursting into tears. This spring, our reading group will seek to understand Zarathustra on its own terms. What sort of work is this book that Nietzsche claimed was both “for all and for none?” How does Zarathustra speak to us now—as authoritarianism is on the rise across the world, as environmental crises deepen, and as experiences of social alienation and disenchantment intensify? And perhaps most importantly, what does Zarathustra require from us, its readers, to gain the instruction it promises?
The assumption of this reading group is that an adequate encounter with Zarathustra will entail modes of engagement and reflection that may deviate—sometimes radically—from conventional academic…
Programming Series: Transcendence and Transformation. Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, Event Coordinator, CSWR
(617)495-4476.
Thursday, April 25, 2024, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
Conference Room, CSWR, 42 Francis Ave.
Psychedelics and the Future of Religion: Book Talk: "Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium" with Erik Davis
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
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The CSWR invites Dr. Erik Davis into conversation for the launch of his new book, Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium (to be released on April 2, 2024). Blotter is the first account of its kind, centering the history, art, and design of the iconic drug delivery device for lysergic acid diethylamide-25, or LSD. Created in collaboration with Mark McCloud's Institute of Illegal Images, the world's largest archive of blotter art, Davis's boldly illustrated exhibition treats his outsider subject with the serious, art-historical respect it deserves, while also staying true to the sense of play, irreverence, and adventure inherent in psychedelic exploration.
Davis weaves together two main stories: first, the largely unknown history of blotter paper's development in the 1960s and its later flowering in the 1970s and 1980s; and second, the story of how San Francisco artist,…
Programming Series: Psychedelics and the Future of Religion. Transcendence and Transformation. Spirituality and Psychedelics. Psychedelics and Ethics. Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, Event Coordinator, CSWR
(617)495-4476.
Tuesday, April 30, 2024, 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM.
Common Room, CSWR
42 Francis Ave.
For more info visit cswr.hds.harvard.edu. Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Conversation with Rebecca McMackin
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Register to attend in person.
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Rebecca McMackin is an ecologically obsessed horticulturalist and garden designer. She is director of horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, where she manages 85 acres of diverse parkland for people, plants, and wildlife.
She has spent the last decade overseeing horticultural construction and organic management while also building out a Horticulture Department focused on cultivating urban biodiversity.
Programming Series: Thinking with Plants and Fungi. Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, Event Coordinator, CSWR
(617)495-4476.
Thursday, May 2, 2024, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM.
For more info visit cswr.hds.harvard.edu.