Statement:

Over time, the focus of my research has shifted from answering historical questions about religion to using historical and ethnographic sources to exploring how people make sense of ambiguous events and experiences that inhabit the indeterminate space between imagination and reality, craziness and inspiration, fiction and faith. I am particularly interested in experiences, people, objects, & events that people perceive and set apart as special and in the practices and alternate conceptions of reality that people oftentimes associate with them. Increasingly, my attention has turned to the processes whereby people – individually and collectively – come to perceive some things as extra-ordinary (or not); adjudicate such claims within and between groups, traditions, and cultures; and mobilize them in the construction of alternate realities via texts, networks, movements, and organizations. 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.

Empirically, I pursue this research primarily within the contexts of American religious history, the history of Christianity in the modern era, and the history of the scientific study of religion, psychology, and related phenomena (e.g., psychical phenomena, magic, superstition).  Theoretically, my work builds on classical theorists, such as Durkheim and Weber, as well as evolutionary and developmental approaches to the study of human behavior.  In an effort to bridge between the humanities and the sciences, I have been advocating a building block approach to the study of religion, spirituality, sacrality, and other special things.

• Revelatory Events: Novel Experiences and the Emergence of New Religious Movements. 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.
• “Revelatory Events and the Emergence of New Age Networks,” in preparation for New Age Spirituality and Theories of Religion: A Comparative Approach, ed. S. J. Sutcliffe and I. S. Gilhus (Equinox)
• “Joseph Smith and the Discovery of the Golden Plates: The Role of Skilled Perception in the Making of Special Things,” in preparation for the Alumna of the Year Lecture, University of Chicago Divinity School.
• “A Tale of Two Congresses: The Psychological Study of Occult, Mystical, and Religious Phenomena, 1900-1909.

• 2010. “Catholic Studies and Religious Studies: Reflections on the Concept of Tradition,”in James Fisher and Margaret McGuiness, eds. Catholic Studies (Fordham).
• 2006. “Envisioning Catholic Studies,” Inaugural Lecture, UCSB.
• 2005. “Positioning Catholics Studies in American Studies, Global Studies, and Religious Studies,” Lecture, UCSB.
• 2005. “Negotiating the Boundaries between Religious Studies and Theological Studies,” Opening Convocation, Graduate Theological Union.
• 2003. “Detachment and Engagement in the Study of ‘Lived
Experience,’” Spiritus: A Journal of Spirituality 3, 186-208.