Spirituality & the Ethics of Religious Borrowing: A Sacred Writes Working Group

Sacred Writes: Public Scholarship on Religion is delighted to announce the launch of a new two-year program, generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Spirituality and the Ethics of Religious Borrowing: A Sacred Writes Working Group.  Spiritual wellness practices like yoga and mindfulness have their origins in religious traditions; but they are often practiced by people outside these contexts. Our group will research ethical questions around spirituality, religion, and “borrowing”, such as: What are the effects of borrowing religious practices for spiritual wellness on religious communities? Are there ways to borrow, adapt, or remix religious traditions that are more purposeful, responsible, and effective?

Emerging from the research interests of Dr. Elizabeth Bucar, Professor of Religion at Northeastern University and Director of Sacred Writes: Public Scholarship on Religion, the 12-person scholarly working group will collaboratively produce new academic research, and share that work with the public. The author of four books, most recently the prize-winning Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Harvard 2022), Bucar’s public scholarship has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal.  The goal is to support both academic research and public engagement on the ethics of spiritual borrowing, to combat misinformation and improve public religious literacy.

working group members: 2025-2027

Natalie Avalos

University of colorado boulder

Natalie Avalos (Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies, University of Colorado Boulder; PhD, University of California Santa Barbara, 2015) is an ethnographer of religion whose research examines contemporary Indigenous religious life, healing historical trauma, and decolonization. A Chicana of Mexican Indigenous descent, born and raised in the Bay Area, Dr. Avalos is currently working on her manuscript, titled Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal. She served as a co-PI for a Luce Foundation-funded research group at the UC Humanities Research Institute, “Humanitarian Ethics, Religious Affinities and the Politics of Dissent.” She is also the recipient of a Sacred Writes media partner fellowship to write about Buddhism and race for Religion Dispatches. 

Avalos studies how Indigenous practitioners in the Denver metro area navigate the increasing use of Indigenous plant medicine like ayahuasca and psilocybin by white Americans for wellness purposes. Her informants are concerned about the metaphysical impacts of the decontextualized use of these plants, including how their commodification and increased white demand may limit Indigenous access. However, Avalos’s study reveals that along with these risks are compelling possible benefits. Within their Indigenous religious context, plants are understood to have conscious, sacred intelligence revered within the larger social body. If Westerners could look through this sacred lens, plant medicines could help address human-centric biases created by colonial relations, and the West's spiritual yearning for a lost connection to the natural world. Such understanding could both benefit our ecological future and inspire rectification of historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

elizabeth bucar

northeastern university

Elizabeth Bucar (PhD, Religious Ethics, University of Chicago), Professor of Religion at Northeastern University and Director of Sacred Writes: Public Scholarship on Religion. Bucar focuses on how a deeper understanding of religious difference can change our sense of what is right and good. The author of four books, most recently the prize-winning Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Harvard 2022), Bucar’s public scholarship has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. 

Focused on helping spiritual seekers make their spirituality more meaningful, responsible, and effective, Bucar will draw on her expertise in ethics and comparative religion to complete a new book during this project, The Religion Factor. A scholar, teacher, and student of religion for 25 years, Bucar argues that exploring the religious insights behind many popular spiritual practices can help even the non-religiously affiliated and SBNRs understand their commitments to well-being, even offering ways to shape or enrich them. She asks readers to consider the possibility that religion is importantly informing spirituality and that restoring a bit of religion might help us live happier and more connected lives.

tara isabella burton

george mason university / catholic university of america

Tara Isabella Burton (DPhil, University of Oxford; Visiting Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University; Visiting Research Fellow, Institutional Flourishing Lab, Catholic University of America) is a theologian and culture critic, and the author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (Public Affairs, 2022) and Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (Public Affairs, 2020). She is a regular contributor on religion and culture to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and has lectured and taught seminars at Yale University, Hobart and William Smith College, Radford University, and Covenant College. Her research has been supported by the Mercatus Center and the Robert Novak Foundation.

Burton is currently at work on a book about the influence of the Western esoteric tradition, from alchemy to Freemasonry to 19th-century “occult” practices like Theosophy and spiritualism, in the development of what we think of today as “scientific progress.” She argues that the category of the “magical” should be understood as part of a wider theological tradition of understanding what it means for human beings to have mastery over nature. Old Gods, to be published by Convergent (Penguin Random House) in 2026, will trace this influence to the resurgence of interest in “occult” practices in contemporary Silicon Valley culture. 

susannah crockford

university of exeter

Susannah Crockford (Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Exeter [UK]; PhD, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2017)  is an anthropologist of New Age spirituality, ecology, and conspiracy theories, and the author of Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona (University of Chicago Press, 2021).  A 2023-24 recipient of an American Academy of Religion Collaborative International Research Grant, she has done fieldwork in Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK, and published on subjects ranging from Goop's jade eggs to climate denial. Dr. Crockford has discussed her work on BBC Radio and CNN India.

Focused on spiritual seeker communities in the American Southwest, among whom she has spent a decade conducting in-person and digital ethnography, Susannah Crockford excavates how white American middle class people seek out spiritual wellness practices as a solution for spiritual yearning, to the tune of $4.2 trillion globally. She argues that thinking about American culture as a “blank slate” contributes to widespread appropriation of spirituality, and that when “spirituality” is associated or compared with “religion” in public discourse, it tends to be persistently and unfairly discredited. She further argues that spirituality's claims of positivity and feeling good are deserving of further nuance and analysis than they typically received. How do those terms get defined by seekers, and filled with meaning? She argues that “good” and “bad” ways of addressing spiritual yearning are often framed in American discourse by ideas of culture, both the importance of cultural belonging and the perception of a lack of culture.

Nalika Gajaweera

University of california santa barbara

Nalika Gajaweera (Research Affiliate, Walter H. Capps Center, University of California, Santa Barbara; PhD, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, 2013) is an anthropologist of Buddhism, race, and ethics, with a focus on community well-being and resilience. Her current book manuscript, Transforming the American Sangha, funded by the Kataly Foundation, is an ethnography of the Insight Meditation movement in North America, focused on the efforts of practitioners of color to raise awareness of oppressive racial conditions in these communities. Her doctoral research examined how Buddhist ethics and practices of giving shaped Sri Lankan local NGOs doing humanitarianism work in the context of two disasters: the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and ethnic conflict that ended in 2009. A former Fulbright fellow, Dr. Gajaweera has conducted fieldwork in North America and South Asia, managing and conducting complex multi-stakeholder research projects, exploring power building efforts among marginalized groups. Funders for these projects included Kataly Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, Hilton Foundation and GHR.

Nalika Gajawira will collaborate with Ann Gleig on a comparative ethnographic study of how Buddhist communities adopt and adapt popular spiritual exercises such as “secular” mindfulness and yoga classes within a wider Buddhist framework. Their work aims to illustrate the processes, frameworks and relationships that can enable more responsible relationships between specific religious communities and the word of spiritual wellness practices.

shreena niketa gandhi

michigan state university

Shreena Niketa Gandhi (Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University; PhD, University of Florida, 2009) is a cultural historian of Hinduism who studies how race, gender, and class inform the  practice of yoga in the contemporary United States.  A member of the inaugural 2019 Sacred Writes public scholarship training cohort, Dr. Gandhi’s work has appeared in The Revealer, Classical Ideas podcast, Living Yoga, and Religion News Service, and, as a member of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, in Religion Compass, Text and Performance Quarterly, and The Washington Post.

Gandhi studies the borrowing of religious practices in healthcare settings, such as the use of yogic pranayama (breathing) techniques to help lung cancer patients. Can these types of cultural exchanges potentially serve to lessen our focus on individuals and shift the conversation to community building and accountability? She hypothesizes that greater nuanced, interdisciplinary attention to these borrowings can increase our engagement and empathy across cultural divides.

ann Gleig

university of central florida

Ann Gleig (Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies, University of Central Florida; PhD, Rice University, 2010) studies spirituality emerging from the encounter between Buddhism and American culture, particularly meditation and mindfulness. The author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019); and co-editor with Scott A. Mitchell of The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, she has published widely about how the incorporation of psychotherapeutic and social justice frameworks have transformed American Buddhist practices. A recipient of a Sacred Writes media partnership to write for Religion Dispatches, Dr. Gleig’s public-facing work has also appeared in The Conversation and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Ann Gleig will collaborate with Nalika Gajawira on a comparative ethnographic study of how Buddhist communities adopt and adapt popular spiritual exercises such as “secular” mindfulness and yoga classes within a wider Buddhist framework. Their work aims to illustrate the processes, frameworks and relationships that can enable more responsible relationships between specific religious communities and the word of spiritual wellness practices.

kira ganga kieffer
wesleyan university

Kira Ganga Kieffer (Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Wesleyan University; PhD, Boston University, 2023) studies contemporary American spiritualities, health, gender, and marketing. Her first book, a history of religion and vaccine skepticism, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. She is the author of  “Smelling Things: Essential Oils and Essentialism in Contemporary American Spirituality,” in Religion & American Culture (2021) and “Manifesting Millions: How Women’s Spiritual Entrepreneurship Genders Capitalism,” in Nova Religio (2020), which received the Thomas Robbins Award for Article of the Year. She has written for Religion & Politics, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Religion for Breakfast.

Kieffer uses textual analysis of spiritual marketing materials to discover how consumer culture creates religious concepts within a secular context. Focused on spiritual items and practices that are marketed to women, Kieffer compares the usage of essential oils by three very different groups of spiritual practitioners: contemporary yogis, evangelical Christians, and witches. Although the usage of essential oils is consumerized, Kieffer argues, the beliefs and practices created by “oilers” are nonetheless meaningful responses to the spiritual yearning. Essential oil practices blur the lines between religious traditions, sharpen individual spirituality, and work to create new collective identities.

cody musselman

harvard university

Cody Musselman (Preceptor, Harvard University; PhD, Religious Studies, Yale University, 2022) is a scholar of American religion, popular culture, and exercise. Her forthcoming first book, Spiritual Exercises: Fitness and Religion in Modern America, focuses on the role of spirituality in fitness regimes including SoulCycle. She received a Sacred Writes media partnership to contribute to the podcast Straight White American Jesus, and her public writing has appeared in Religion Dispatches and The Conversation.

Musselman investigates how upper-middle-class Americans use fitness regimes like Peloton, SoulCycle, and Intensati as technologies of spiritual yearning, mixing and matching fitness practices with those of multiple world religions. She hypothesizes that  their yearning for spiritual fulfillment has in effect been contained rather than satisfied by the capitalist marketplace; and that the growing number of SBNR Americans have the potential to be radically disruptive of the status quo should they apply their spiritual yearning to collective, rather than individual needs. 

Kaitlyn ugoretz

nanzan university

Kaitlyn Ugoretz (Lecturer, Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nanzan University, Japan; PhD, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, in progress) is an anthropologist of religion focused on the globalization of Japanese Shinto practices through popular culture such as anime, video games, and Marie Kondo’s decluttering. The Associate Editor of The Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, and a member of the Sacred Writes 2021 public scholarship training cohort, Prof. Ugoretz also promotes public scholarship on Japanese religions through her award-winning educational YouTube channel Eat Pray Anime, in podcast interviews, cultural consulting, and her writing for venues including Religion News Service and The Conversation.

Ugoretz will conduct a digital ethnography of Japanese tidying guru Marie Kondo. She notes that while Western scholarship tends to consider Kondo to be “spiritual,” the Japanese find her to be too “religious,” reflecting aspects of Buddhist and Shinto traditions. This leads Ugoretz to argue that our understanding of spiritual yearning should expand---it is neither a new nor an American phenomenon. The boundary between what is “religious” and what is “spiritual” is historically and cultural constructed, and shaped by ideas of race, class, and globalization. She argues that spiritual yearning emerges from human existential needs and concerns, and should be distinguished from the capitalistic patterns of “spiritual consumption” that it often inspires.

Press Release: John Templeton Foundation funds Sacred Writes Working Group on Spirituality and the Ethics of Religious Borrowing (2025)