Interdisciplinary Scholarship
While his formal training is in philosophy, theology, and religion, Brother Larry’s research draws on a range of disciplines from history to linguistics to the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences, and employs both classical and computational methods. He has taught courses in ethics, Chinese philosophy, and religion & science at Curry and Emmanuel Colleges.
Psychedelics, Religious Experience & Health Applications
Psychedelics have been used for millennia across human cultures to cultivate spiritual experiences and facilitate healing. More recently, psychedelics have proven effective as a component of treating several intractable mental health conditions. This project seeks to document the landscape of the current psychedelic renaissance in religion and health.
Religion & Artificial Intelligence
AI is everywhere these days. Brother Larry is particularly interested in how Confucian ethics is an especially amenable paradigm for incorporating AI, and in how humans anthropomorphize AI in ways more similar to how we anthropomorphize God than to how we anthropomorphize other parts of our lifeworld.
Religion, Race, & Covid-19
This project was carried out in 2021-2022 under the auspices of an American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellowship hosted by the division of medicine and science at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
Language as Ritual
Brother Larry’s dissertation proposes a novel theory of language as ritual, employing resources from both Western and Confucian ritual theories, and then explains how this theory accounts for the capacity of language to say what cannot be said.
Confucianism
Brother Larry has cultivated expertise and published on both the history and texts of the Confucian tradition and its contemporary social and religious significance.
Philosophy of Religion
Brother Larry’s core work is in philosophy of religion, including making substantive contributions to the field and in developing critical analyses of the field itself.
