For an interview with leading researchers, read a Nov. 9, 2001, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly story, “Religion and the Brain.”

For an overview, read a May 7, 2001, Newsweek story, “Religion and the Brain” by Sharon Begley, posted on the American-Buddha.com website.

Nancey Murphy, professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., is the author of Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 1990). She thinks that how God acts in the natural world is one of the most pressing theological questions. And she believes that God’s action in human life must be […]

Robert John Russell is the founder and director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences and a professor of theology and science at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. He’s a leading researcher committed to a positive interaction between the fields of theology and science.

Mario Beauregard, University of Montreal neuroscientist, has studied when religious feelings are experienced by using sophisticated brain scans to see inside the brains of Carmelite nuns as they recall a spiritual experience.

Michael Persinger, psychology professor at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, has conducted experiments with a helmet that pulses bursts of electrical activity to the brain, stimulating what he calls a “God experience.” The experience of God, he says, is definitely produced in the brain.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, is a pioneer in experimental neurology who found that patients who suffer seizures from temporal lobe epilepsy display an unusual obsession with religious matters. Among his research interests is the neural basis of empathy.

Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College, is a co-author of Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (Random House, 2002). Newberg and his colleagues used high-tech imaging techniques to examine the brains of meditating Buddhists and Franciscan […]

Mary Segers is professor of political science at Rutgers University, Newark campus. Her specialties include religion and politics. She co-wrote the book Faith-Based Initiatives and the Bush Administration: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).