Contemplation + Nature: An Interview With Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo
Landscape architects, artists, painters, designers have known for many years—many decades, centuries—that nature has the power to induce a contemplative state of mind.
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Night of Beginnings: A Passover Haggadah
Reviewed by Ariel Evan Mayse, this review discusses Marcia Falk’s Night of Beginnings, a reimagined Passover Haggadah designed to inspire contemplative practice. Falk combines poetic liturgy, gender-inclusive language, and mystical reflections to offer new interpretations of traditional Jewish texts. She emphasizes the importance of personal and communal transformation, focusing on connection, humility, and compassion rather than power and exclusion. Through her creative blessings, storytelling, and visual art, Falk invites readers to experience the Passover Seder as a dynamic ritual filled with beauty, renewal, and spiritual depth.
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Neuroscience for Designing Green Spaces: Contemplative Landscapes
Reviewed by Ariel Evan Mayse, this review explores how urban green spaces can promote mental well-being through intentional design informed by neuroscience, as discussed by Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo in Neuroscience for Designing Green Spaces: Contemplative
Landscapes, published in 2023. The book introduces the Contemplative Landscape Model, a framework identifying seven features that enhance contemplative experiences in built environments. Mayse discusses why the book is a significant contribution to the field of Contemplative Studies, and what more there is to be done.
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE: Practicing the “Threefold Mystery”: Rethinking a Shingon Ritual from Dichotomy to Dialectic
After a century and a half of focus on Buddhist doctrine, academic attention is increasingly being paid to practice. What remains undertheorized, however, is the relation between the two. An example of this is the idea that tantric practice is simply a ritual technology, separate and autonomous from doctrinal formulation. This is a persisting academic trope, one that conceptualizes doctrine and practice dichotomously.
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE: No Attainment, Nothing to Attain: A Buddhist Reflection on Psychedelics
The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and the use of psychedelics is not intrinsic to experiences obtained through them and is instead relational—a function of how they alter consciousness. In support of that claim, I first present a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account of consciousness that calls critically into question the merits of both physicalist and phenomenalist reductionism in exploring the meditative and psychedelic alterations of consciousness.
What is Contemplation? An Interview with Michael Sheehy
Michael Sheehy is Research Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center at University of Virginia where he is Principal at CIRCL Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Contemplative Studies.
Conference Recap: American Academy of Religion Annual Conference, 2024
The American Academy of Religion held its 2024 Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA, November 23-26. The Contemplative Studies unit sponsored or co-sponsored three panels exploring contemplative practices, experiences, and traditions. Topics ranged from Confucian contemplations for college students, to comparative theology, ethnographies of lay healers and nuns, accounts of adverse effects of meditation, and…
What is Contemplation? An Interview With Oludamini Ogunnaike
Oludamini Ogunnaike is an Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (2020) and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (2020).
What is Contemplation? An Interview With Yuria Celidwen
Yuria Celidwen, PhD, is an Indigenous scholar of Nahua and Maya lineages from the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Her research centers on Indigenous forms of contemplation and the transcendent experience embodied in prosocial behavior. Celidwen is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology of the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Othering & Belonging Institute. She is the author of Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Well-Being (2024).
CALL FOR PAPERS – SPECIAL ISSUE #6
The JCS Editors are excited to announce a call for papers for a Special Issue focusing on Confucian Contemplation with guest editors Bin Song (Washington College) and Judson Murray (Capital University).
End of content
End of content