The Classical Ideas Podcast

Latest Episodes:

EP 360: Inari Origin Stories and Buddhist Public Scholarship w/Dr. Matthew Keller Sep 25, 2026

Show notes

Dr. Matthew Keller is Public Scholar of Buddhism within the Curatorial Department at the Detroit Institute of Arts! He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in Asian Religions.

This episode supported by Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/

Matthew Keller at American Council of Learned Societies: https://www.acls.org/fellow-grantees/matthew-keller/

EP 359: Longchengpa and Lineage Prayers w/Dr. Renée Ford Sep 03, 2026

Show notes

Renée Ford, Ph.D. is a Lab Coordinator at the Contemplative Sciences Center, providing support for contemplative research at the CIRCL Lab. Renée's keen interest in understanding lived experiences in various contexts is a key motivation to her engagement here. She is trained in microphenomenology interviews, a type of interview that focuses on a short moment of experience and interested to apply this method in ongoing research studies.

Renée completed her Ph.D. at Rice University in religious studies, and her dissertation focused on how affective states such as devotion and confidence function in Tibetan Buddhist tantric practices. Prior to joining the CSC, Renée has held fellowship positions at Aarhus University and Ruhr University – Bochum. She has conducted fieldwork in Nepal and India, conducting various types of interviews to capture lived experience and translation work. She also has taught courses in religious studies, including Buddhism and Hinduism, in multiple institutions.

On this episode, we dive into a primer about Tibetan Buddhism, lineage prayers, and a bit about the life of the Tibetan scholar, Longchengpa.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org

Visit Renée Ford online: https://csc.virginia.edu/people/renee-ford

EP 358: Buddhist Military Chaplaincy in Korea w/Dr. Jonathan C. Feuer Aug 17, 2026

Show notes

Jonathan Feuer earned his Ph.D in Asian Languages and Cultures from UCLA in 2023. His current book project is entitled Buddhist Militarism, Violence, and Religious Freedom: The South Korean Buddhist Military Chaplaincy and his research interests include Buddhist modernity, South Korean history, and religion and violence. On this episode, we discuss Buddhist military chaplaincy in detail and preview what readers can expect with his forthcoming book! You can find his work at https://jonathancfeuer.com/.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/

EP 357: Khemethaka Nunnery, Daw Gunawati, and pāramī w/Dr. M.K. Long Aug 10, 2026

Show notes

MK Long is a historian and ethnographer of Buddhism and gender. Her current project highlights vernacular auto/biographical writings of Buddhist women in Myanmar, examining their rhetorical strategies of self-presentation and how they theorize Buddhist authority, temporality, and belonging. Long's study of vernacular literature of the 1980s-90s foregrounds its conditions of production, not only its relationship to Buddhist biographical and narrative traditions, but also authoritarian censorship, state-driven reorganization of monastic institutions, and shifting citizenship regimes. This work is shaped and informed by Long's ethnographic fieldwork in a large, mission-oriented nunnery in downtown Yangon, Myanmar, and its network of branch nunneries throughout the country.

Long's research has drawn support from the Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF), the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA), and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, awarded through the American Council of Learned Societies.

Long earned her doctorate from the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University with a graduate minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2024. She holds an M.T.S in Buddhist Studies (Harvard Divinity School, 2016), an M.A. in International Relations & Religion (Boston University, 2014), and a B.A. in Religion (Smith College, 2010).

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/templeton-working-group

EP 356: Buddhism and Experimental Music w/Dr. Julian Butterfield Aug 03, 2026

Show notes

Julian Butterfield is a scholar of medieval Chinese Buddhist literature with a special interest in how Mahāyāna Buddhist narratives depict and solicit feeling. His current monograph project recovers the aesthetic and affective dimensions of Lotus Sūtra devotion in fifth-to-eighth-century China, arguing that the transmission of this pivotal Buddhist scripture relied heavily on the cultivation of strong emotions among practitioners. A secondary, public-facing research project investigates the interactions of Buddhist media and musical experimentation from the nineteenth century to the present. Julian holds a BA and MA from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University, where his research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Religion at Princeton University.

Read: https://tricycle.org/magazine/eliane-radique-alien-roots/

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/

Visit Julian Butterfield: https://julianbutterfield.com/

EP 355: Buddhist Charities in Urban Vietnam w/Dr. Sara Swenson Jul 28, 2026

Show notes

Sara Swenson works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. Her current research explores how grassroots charity volunteers in Vietnam adapt Buddhist values and practices to navigate ethical struggles amid rapid urbanization and she is the author of "Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charities in Urban Vietnam" from Oxford University Press!

Visit Sara Swenson online: https://saswenson.com/about/

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/

EP 354: Transforming the American Sangha w/Dr. Nalika Gajaweera Jul 07, 2026

Show notes

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.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/templeton-working-group

Visit Nalika Gajaweera:

https://nalikagajaweera.com/

https://dornsife.usc.edu/crcc/profile/nalika-gajaweera/

EP 353: Western Esoteric Tradition and "Scientific Progress" with Dr. Tara Isabella Burton Jun 30, 2026

Show notes

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.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/templeton-working-group

Visit Tara Isabella Burton: http://www.taraisabellaburton.com

EP 352: A Perturbed System Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World w/ Dr. Susannah Crockford Jun 23, 2026

Show notes

A moving study of how religion shapes Western climate discourse. Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we've built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why? In A Perturbed System, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we must understand the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis, a result of Christian colonialism that we (religious or not) still struggle to describe without religious language. Climate discourse in the United States and northern Europe, Crockford shows, is framed by the same theological motifs that drove extraction, including ideas about prophecy, mediation, sacrifice, original sin, cult, messiah, and apocalypse. By listening to people on the edge of the crisis, A Perturbed System reveals a world in transition, what happens when worlds end—ecologically, socially, politically, and personally—and how we might live through these endings together. Susannah Crockford is a lecturer at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/templeton-working-group Buy the book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/C/S/au86433807.html

EP 351: Dr. Ira Helderman on Adverse Meditation Effects Jun 14, 2026

Show notes

Ira Helderman PhD, LPC (Adjunct Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture, Vanderbilt University; PhD, Religious Studies, Vanderbilt University, 2016) studies how psychotherapists' definitions of what is and is not religious shape their understandings of caregiving, health, and illness. His first book, Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (University of North Carolina Press 2019), is the first comprehensive examination of the surprisingly diverse ways that psychotherapists have approached Buddhist traditions. Helderman publishes in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of the American Academy of Religion and, committed to public scholarship, writes regularly for popular publications such as Psychology Today, Religion Dispatches, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Dr. Helderman is also a practicing psychotherapist and clinical supervisor who has worked in the mental health field for over 20 years in a variety of clinical settings from in-patient addiction treatment centers and psychiatric hospitals to his current private practice.

Helderman is currently studying the widespread psychotherapeutic use of Buddhist meditation. Though meditation is often described by patients as a way of easing spiritual yearning, it can also generate "adverse effects" like agitation, traumatic memories, and hallucinations. Dr. Helderman will examine how psychotherapists have conducted a "differential diagnosis" of such cases—distinguishing spiritual experience from psychopathology—and showing that how we define what is and is not "religious" shapes the fields of mental health, psychology, and religious studies.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/templeton-working-group

Visit Dr. Ira Helderman: https://irahelderman.com

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