Statement:

Over time, the focus of my research has shifted from answering historical questions about religion to using historical materials to explore how people make sense of ambiguous events and experiences that inhabit the indeterminate space between imagination and reality, craziness and inspiration, fiction and faith. Increasingly, in other words, my attention has turned to the underlying processes whereby people decide that experiences and events are religious and then, in some cases, develop traditions of practice to recreate them in the present. In exploring these processes, I work comparatively to generate the detailed descriptive analyses favored by scholars of religion and to explore the naturalistic explanations developed by researchers in the social and natural sciences.

As holder of the Virgil Cordano OFM Chair in Catholic Studies, I teach some courses that focus specifically on Catholic history and practice and others that examine Catholic history and practice alongside other traditions.  My undergraduate courses are structured around questions in the study of religion that can be addressed from both the perspectives of the humanities and the sciences, e.g.: How and to what extent do religious or spiritual practices transform people?  What happens to a tradition when it is transmitted from one cultural context to another?  How do people know or decide if an event or experience should be attributed to a supernatural source?  What things do people hold sacred and how do different conceptions of the sacred inform cultural conflicts?

• Channeled Entities and Revealed Texts: A Group Psychology of Revelation. This research project looks at the process whereby new entities (seen, heard, or embodied) and/or new texts emerge. The focus of my analysis is on selected 20th century new age channelers compared and contrasted with earlier new religious movements, such as Mormonism, and non-religious phenomena, such as alter personalities, imaginary companions, fictional characters, and computer based avatars.
• What Matters: Ethnographies of Value in the (Not So) Secular Age, co-edited with Courtney Bender in conjunction with the Social Science Research Council.

• “Catholic Studies and Religious Studies: Reflections on the Concept of Tradition,”in James Fisher and Margaret McGuiness, eds. Catholic Studies (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2009).
• “Envisioning Catholic Studies,” Inaugural Lecture, UC Santa Barbara, February 13, 2006.
• “Positioning Catholics Studies in American Studies, Global Studies, and Religious Studies,” Lecture, UC Santa Barbara, April 6, 2005.
• “Negotiating the Boundaries between Religious Studies and Theological Studies,” Opening Convocation, Graduate Theological Union, September 22, 2005.
• “Detachment and Engagement in the Study of ‘Lived Experience,’” Spiritus: A Journal of Spirituality 3 (2003): 186-208.