About 

I am a teacher, published author, and commentator. I hold a PhD in “Religion, Psychology and Culture” from Vanderbilt University where I am now a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department teaching classes such as “Spirituality” and Alternative Medicine and Mindfulness, Religion, and Healing. I previously taught classes for some years in Vanderbilt’s graduate Counseling program where I brought my research to topics such as Counseling Diverse Populations and Addictions.

This website is primarily for my writing which currently is largely within the field of religious studies. Writing has always been a passion of mine, however, and I also have an undergraduate BFA in screenwriting from New York University’s film school. Many twists and turns in my life after NYU, I began working in the mental health field in 2001 and am a practicing psychotherapist in private practice in Nashville, TN. If you want to learn more about my psychotherapy practice please click here. It was only after some years of working full time as a therapist that I became deeply fascinated by religious studies and started down an entirely new path.

Today, my research examines how psychotherapists and psychotherapeutic ideas shape the way that people are religious in the United States.

My first full length book project, entitled Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion, is now available from the University of North Carolina Press. Prescribing the Dharma maps the surprisingly diverse ways that psychotherapists have related to Buddhist traditions as a case study of how concepts of the “religious” and “not-religious” function in the lives of contemporary communities.  My research has also appeared in peer-reviewed journals like The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, in popular publications like Psychology Today and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and I have presented my work both nationally and internationally. You can read more about Prescribing the Dharma and find a selection of some of my publications if you keep scrolling below.

Over the years, my interests have taken me to a number of different areas of the religious studies subfield called “religion and psychology.” I have previously done some research on the continuing debates about how Sigmund Freud viewed his Jewishness and looked at the uniqueness of "pastoral counseling" as a discipline in a more interconnected, religiously diverse world.

I’m currently working, however, on two new major book projects. The first is a historical study of how meditation retreats, and reports of so-called “meditation sickness,” came to forever transform the ways that psychotherapists frame their relationship to the “religious” or “spiritual” - and how this history ultimately radically complicates entrenched scholarly critiques of “therapeutic culture.” The second, interrelated to the first, consists of larger analyses of the ways that psychotherapists and psychologists have contributed to contemporary understandings of the term “spirituality” (e.g., the relatively new idea that “spirituality” refers to a quality that is neither “religious” or “secular”).

While my available writing is currently mostly focused on religious studies, I also anticipate returning to creative writing soon so stay tuned!