Samuel Brinkman, neuropsychologist and adjunct psychology professor at Abilene Christian University in Texas, has lectured on how studying the brain can lead to insights about morality, spirituality and personal responsibility.

Sohee Park, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has studied shamanism and the brain.

Charles L. Raison, psychiatry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has studied Tibetan Buddhism’s effects on the brain.

George Graham, philosophy professor at Georgia State University, says it can be difficult to distinguish between signs of illness and religious insight, particularly when the purported insight raises doubts about the emotional health of the religious person.

Matthew Alper, New York-based author of The “God” Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God (Rogue Press, 2001), proposes a biological basis for human perception and the spiritual realm. He believes that evolutionary adaptations account for the existence of regions in the brain that generate spiritual consciousness. These regions, he […]

John Haught, an emeritus professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., believes that spiritual experiences are connected to the brain processes and dependent on them but not reducible to them. He says it is possible to distinguish between the chemical basis of experiences and the experiences themselves. Life and mind cannot be reduced […]

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

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.