Whose work we build on — organized by where their contribution sits in the project, not by department. The work is interdisciplinary by design, so some scholars appear in more than one place. That overlap is the point: the method lives where philosophy, comparative religion, systems thinking, and the psychology of the self meet.
The epistemology that lets a comparative database make a claim at all: truth as a process that "happens" through testing, and convergence across independent streams as the warrant.
The patron saint of the method. Varieties of Religious Experience brackets the metaphysics and asks what religion does to a creature — feeling, action, habit. "Truth happens to an idea." The whole project extends his little-t move to hundreds of traditions.
Supplies the definitional tools James lacked: descriptive vs. genetic definition. The raw claims are descriptive; the convergent observations can only be defined genetically — arranged so the pattern forms in the reader's mind. Anti-substantivization: keep verbs as verbs.
Coined consilience (1840): independent lines of evidence, gathered for different purposes, unexpectedly converging on the same conclusion. The project takes the shape — when a move rhymes across traditions that came to it by very different routes, the agreement carries weight the way consilient evidence does. The warrant is the rhyme, not a claim about who influenced whom.
The foil. His Consilience (1998) borrows Whewell's term but makes it reductive — all knowledge collapsing down to physics. The project does Wilson's method (cross-domain testing) while refusing his hierarchy: convergence without reduction.
Originator of pragmatism and of abduction — inference to the best explanation. The project's logic is abductive, not inductive or deductive: which hypothesis would best account for so many independent traditions noticing the same thing?
Pragmatism as a logic of inquiry — principles for making progress when concepts are vague and contested. The project is a logic of inquiry applied to comparative religion; "productive error" is a recurring frame in the essays.
The Great Chain of Being (1936): the history of ideas as traceable "unit-ideas" recombining across centuries. The model for treating an idea (e.g. providence's golden chain) as a portable unit you can follow through a corpus.
synthesis note →The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: paradigms, and how frameworks govern what counts as evidence. Backstops the project's bias-visibility commitment — the framing makes some findings visible and others invisible.
The source of the project's central word: grammar. Grammatical investigation, meaning-as-use, and family resemblance — the idea that a category coheres through overlapping likenesses, not a shared essence. Built directly into the codebook writing guide.
An Essay on Metaphysics: every position rests on "absolute presuppositions" — the unargued frame beneath the argument. The philosophical name for the project's "sitz" substrate: the conditions that make a meaning historically legible.
What it means to study "religion" comparatively at all — and the warnings against over-claiming a shared essence.
The Meaning and End of Religion: "religion" is a modern reification; what's real is faith + cumulative tradition. Shaped the project's tradition-internal-first discipline and the "missing middle" (Column 2 mechanics) it tries to recover.
Revelatory Events + the ascription model: an explicitly building-block, reproducible comparative method. The closest living methodological kin — the project aims at "a methodological contribution at the scale of Taves's ascription model."
synthesis note →The Nature of Doctrine: the cultural-linguistic theory — traditions as languages, not collections of propositions. The project's sharpest internal critic: is "disposition to uncertainty" a neutral frame or a liberal-Protestant one imposed on traditions claiming certainty?
Religion as ultimate concern — the move that lets the project include secular and philosophical traditions on the same footing as religious ones. Each tradition's "ultimate concern" is now a field in the database.
The Symbolism of Evil: the "second naïveté" — reading symbol seriously after criticism, not before. The posture of the whole archive: rigorous and yet open to what the symbols do.
Phenomenology of the sacred; the grand comparativist whose universalism the project both inherits and deliberately disciplines (no shared essence assumed; recurrence is empirical, not innate).
The Idea of the Holy: the numinous — the felt, pre-conceptual quality of religious experience. A reference point for the affective layer the observations try to track.
The sociological founders — religion as collective fact (Durkheim) and as meaning-bearing social action (Weber, Economy and Society). Background for the "sitz" / contextual-conditions layer.
The Sacred Canopy: the "sacred canopy" and plausibility structures — a meaning-system stays believable only while the social structures that hold it up remain intact. The mechanism behind the modern meaning-gap: when the communal scaffolding goes, the canopy thins.
Genealogies of Religion: "religion" as a category with a power-laden history. Keeps the project honest about whose definition is operating and what it excludes.
The experiential-expressivist ancestor — religion as the "feeling of absolute dependence." The source position behind the project's affective layer, and the target of Lindbeck's critique (already on this page). The site holds the critique; this is the thing being critiqued.
A Secular Age and The Language Animal: the modern "immanent frame," and meaning as constituted through language rather than merely labelled by it. Underwrites the project's claim that a tradition's vocabulary makes the experience it names.
synthesis note →The Comparative Religious Ideas Project (Boston University): the direct "someone tried this systematically" precedent — a structured, collaborative, category-tested comparison across traditions. The closest prior attempt at a disciplined comparative method.
Comparative theology — close reading across two traditions at once, refusing a neutral metalanguage. The institutional neighbour at Harvard; a check on the project's database-scale move toward the texture of the single passage.
The contrast case. The Global Ethic argues convergence top-down — declaring shared values. The project defines itself against this: it lets convergence emerge bottom-up from coded passages, claiming nothing in advance.
A pluralism foil. Posits a single noumenal "Real" behind every tradition. The project refuses the shared-essence postulate — analogies between traditions are moves that rhyme, not windows onto one thing.
Process thought: reality as becoming rather than substance. The metaphysical root of the project's "transformation" language and its anti-substantivization discipline (keep verbs as verbs).
Imagining Religion: comparison is the scholar's construction, never simply found in nature ("there is no data for religion"). The methodological conscience reminding the project that its categories are made, not discovered.
The empirical religion-and-health evidence base — the large-N literature on practice and well-being. Background for the project's claim that formation technologies have measurable effects.
Navayana Buddhism: religion deliberately re-engineered against caste. A case where a tradition is itself a structural-transformation variable — the sitz substrate (caste) made into the object of the change.
What the project is NOT. Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, Frithjof Schuon, Huston Smith, and Joseph Campbell assert one mystical truth behind all traditions. The project rejects this essence-claim — convergence, where it appears, is an empirical finding, not a starting assumption. Steven Katz's constructivist critique (experience is shaped by tradition, not pre-given) is the project's ally here.
With Plato, the source of metaxy — the "in-between." The project's conceptual heart: meaning is made neither in raw experience nor finished doctrine but in the between; spirituality is the attention that makes it visible.
The empirical literature on meaning as a human capacity — how it is built, measured, lost, and rebuilt. The construct the project's whole question ("how does meaning get made?") rests on; drawn from the meaning-making capacity DR.
Man's Search for Meaning + logotherapy: meaning as a survival capacity, not a luxury. The root of the whole construct — that a person can endure almost any "how" given a "why."
Educator and writer on formation; the idea of the "third thing." The soul is shy and won't be looked at directly, so we approach it indirectly — through a poem, a story, an image set between us and the hard material. What the project takes: this is the mechanism behind meaning-making by analogy — a tradition's text (or an essay, or the Garden) is a third thing you make your own meaning through, sidelong.
The meaning-making model of coping: the gap between global meaning (one's overall frame) and situational meaning (a specific event) is what drives the work of re-meaning. The operational engine behind the whole field.
Meanings of Life: the four needs for meaning — purpose, value, efficacy, and self-worth. A checklist for what a tradition has to supply to "work" as a meaning-system.
The Meaning in Life Questionnaire — distinguishing the presence of meaning from the search for it. The evidence that meaning is measurable, which licenses comparison across persons and traditions.
Stages of Faith: faith reframed as meaning-making development across the life-course. A staged-transformation corroboration from inside the psychology of religion.
Ego development theory — the "growing up" axis (psychological complexity) distinguished from the "waking up" axis (spiritual realization). Helps the project keep two different transformation claims apart.
The seeking ⇄ dwelling model of spiritual development: dwelling is resting in an established meaning-home (comfort, safety); seeking is the questing, anxiety-driven movement that drives growth — and mature faith holds both in balance. The pilgrimage / Garden is a "seeking" structure; the dialectic names the rhythm of a formation journey.
paper →Faith development in young adulthood; the image of meaning "shipwreck" and its reconstitution. Names why losing or leaving a meaning-world feels like shipwreck — and why re-formation afterward is possible.
The Denial of Death + the experimental TMT program (Greenberg · Pyszczynski · Solomon): meaning as the mortality-buffer — cultural worldviews that manage the terror of finitude. Why meaning-systems are defended so fiercely.
Existential Psychotherapy: meaninglessness as one of the four existential givens (with death, freedom, isolation). The clinical frame for what traditions are answering.
Meaning-reconstruction in grief — bereavement as the narrative re-authoring of a disrupted world. The clearest worked case of situational meaning being rebuilt.
The clinical absence of meaning: Breitbart's Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy (built for advanced cancer) and Kissane's work on demoralization as a distinct syndrome. Evidence that meaning can be deliberately restored.
The founder of organizational sense-making: meaning is made retrospectively, in the act of accounting for what happened. The "sense-making" half of the section — and the one glaring gap the project had to close.
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis: a synthetic diagnosis of contemporary meaninglessness and the loss of "relevance realization." The popular name for the cultural condition the project responds to.
The secular "meaning gap": as inherited religious frameworks recede, secular life has struggled to reproduce the communal and transcendent connections they supplied, and people adopt surrogate beliefs in their place. Names, in psychological terms, the contemporary gap the work speaks to.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism: the population-level stakes — rising mortality tied to lost meaning, community, and purpose. The macro evidence that this is not only a clinical question.
A contested construct, included as a foil. "SQ" / spiritual intelligence (Zohar & Marshall; Emmons; Mayer) tries to make spirituality a measurable aptitude. The project tracks the construct but does not endorse it — its validity is disputed, and the project's "spirituality = the attention that makes meaning visible" is a different claim.
The forebears the project explicitly places itself among: people who found portable patterns across domains, or built open access to a vast corpus. What this project adds to each: it publishes the method, not just the result.
Thinking in Systems: archetypes that recur across ecology, economics, public health. The project aims to be "the empirical Meadows for the inner life" — archetypes derived corpus-driven, not essayistically.
A Pattern Language: cross-context patterns named from intuition. The project supplies the empirical method behind the discernment — patterns derived via multi-LLM inter-rater reliability rather than the architect's eye.
Whole Earth Catalog: curated tools + access. The project shares the HOW — methodology, corpus, and tooling — not just the WHAT. (the Garden's "access to tools" ancestor.)
The Encyclopédie: comprehensive encyclopedic ambition. The project adds coding + provenance + bias-aware, AI-augmented methodology to that ambition.
The foil within the lineage. Vast empirical breadth in book form — but he withholds the methodology. The project publishes corpus + method + tooling so others can extend, audit, and contest.
Distant Reading / Graphs, Maps, Trees: reading a whole corpus at scale instead of close-reading a few canonical texts. The digital-humanities precedent for what the archive does to hundreds of traditions.
The founder of digital humanities — and he founded it on a religious corpus (the Index Thomisticus, every word of Aquinas, on punch-cards from 1949). The project's patron saint: computation in the service of a sacred text.
The Database of Religious History + quantitative, computational comparative religion. The closest living precedent to what this project builds — a structured, queryable corpus of traditions, scholar-coded at scale.
Distant Horizons (Underwood) and Macroanalysis (Jockers): cultural analytics and text-mining beyond Moretti. The methodological state-of-the-art for finding pattern across a large literary corpus.
How to compare without flattening — and the structural / ritual / historical tools that make patterns legible.
The methodological template. He moved linguistic universals from speculation to empirical typology — sample languages, ask what actually recurs. The project mirrors this exactly: sample traditions, code them, ask what recurs across no-contact traditions.
A disclaimed move. Structural anthropology posited species-given mental structures. The project explicitly refuses this: recurrence is descriptive, not evidence of innate cognitive architecture.
Purity and Danger: classification, boundary, and "matter out of place." A tool for reading how traditions order experience and where they draw lines.
The Ritual Process: liminality and the structure / anti-structure of transformation. Directly informs the staged-transformation observations and the "threshold" essays.
Futures Past: the semantics of historical time — how concepts carry different temporal horizons. One of the three lenses on the Romans tree; anchors the "sitz" (when-and-where) layer.
synthesis note →Visions of Politics: read a text by recovering what its author was doing in its context. The contextualist discipline behind the project's refusal to read passages anachronistically.
Metaphors We Live By: thought is structured by conceptual metaphor. Tools for the essays on how a metaphor (a chain, a tree, a guest house) hardens into doctrine.
How to Do Things with Words + Speech Acts: language as performative — saying can do (blessing, vowing, forgiving). The source of the "perform" mechanism the project built this week: a passage that acts, not just asserts.
"On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme": the argument that wholly incommensurable schemes are incoherent — which licenses cross-tradition comparison in the first place. The reply to the relativist who says traditions can't be compared at all.
reading note →The relativity foils. Linguistic relativity — that the grammar you speak shapes the thoughts you can have. Davidson reads against them; the project keeps the tension live: traditions' vocabularies differ, yet still rhyme.
The comparative-empirical wing — studying religion as a cross-cultural cognitive and behavioural phenomenon. A near-neighbour to the project's method, with which it shares the move "sample widely, ask what recurs."
Cognitive foundations of religious ideas — why "minimally counterintuitive" concepts spread (Boyer) and how representations propagate culturally (Sperber's epidemiology of beliefs). The cognitive account of recurrence.
The comparative-empirical CSR program: Whitehouse's "modes of religiosity" + the Seshat ritual database; Norenzayan's Big Gods on belief and large-scale cooperation. The closest CSR analogue to a coded cross-tradition corpus.
The Column-2 mechanics layer — what actually reorganizes in a person, told in a register the post-critical seeker can use.
The depth-psychology substrate — the unconscious, defense, the dynamic self. Background for shadow, projection, and the "inner multitudes" essays.
Shadow, the Self, integrative symbols. One Big-T interpretation of the "already-are" observation; a recurring lens in the shadow / image / dream essays.
Self psychology: the Self coheres through mirroring. The mechanism behind the archive's reflective design — seeing your own pattern reflected back so something coheres.
The holding environment and transitional space — the safe-enough between where play, symbol, and a true self can form. Pairs with Kohut; the developmental name for the "in-between" the archive tries to hold open.
Constructive-developmental theory: meaning-making complexity grows through stages. Independent secular corroboration of the staged-transformation observation.
I Am a Strange Loop: the self as a self-referential loop. The cognitive-science vocabulary for the "two birds" / observing-self pattern — the one that watches and the one that eats.
The body-knowing strand: the felt sense (Gendlin), trauma held in the body (van der Kolk), the nervous system's safety/threat states (Porges). The empirical backing for the "body always has the answer" essays.
Internal Family Systems — the psyche as a system of parts with a core Self. The clinical analog of Rumi's guest house; backbone of the "inner multitudes / no bad parts" essays.
Tacit knowing — "we know more than we can tell." Why some observations resist propositional statement and must be defined genetically; bridges epistemology and the psychology of skill.
A single passage (Romans 8) followed through its whole reception history — the project's method shown on one text. The grace / predestination debate, edition by edition. (These are primarily read, not framework-builders — they populate the corpus.)
The canonical worked example for the whole methodology — grace, predestination, the African sitz. The anti-Pelagian writings anchor the golden-chain reading of Romans 8.
The medieval-to-Reformation spine of the debate: the Summa, the Institutes, the Bondage of the Will and Lectures on Romans — each re-reading the same chapter from a new world.
The modern and the dissenting voices — Barth's Epistle to the Romans + Church Dogmatics, against the Wesleyan / Arminian / Edwardsian arguments over free will. The debate's living edges.
Twentieth-century Pauline scholarship — Stendahl's "introspective conscience of the West," Sanders on Palestinian Judaism, plus the major critical commentaries. The scholarly apparatus around the seed.
Reading Paul against erasure — Cone's black theology of liberation, Bowens's African American Readings of Paul. Built into the seed so the reception history is not only the Western canon.
Scholars and teachers cited for a specific tradition's framing — the people whose authority the comparativist defers to inside their own house.
Buddhist studies at HDS; the source of the "two birds" teaching from the Mundaka Upanishad and the idea of stories as "belvederes" — viewing platforms that reconfigure perception without instruction.
Tibetan teacher; named spiritual materialism — collecting renunciation the way others collect things. A recurring trap-name in the simplicity essays.
Pioneering scholar of Sufism and of Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya — the foundational source for the Rābiʿa material ("set fire to heaven, douse the fires of hell").
Philosophy as a Way of Life: ancient philosophy as spiritual exercise, not doctrine. The bridge that lets Stoicism + ancient philosophy sit beside the religious traditions as formation technologies.
Jewish thought: Buber's I and Thou (the dialogical self) and Heschel's radical amazement. Sources for the dialogue / encounter essays.
Kyoto School; pure experience and the logic of basho (place/field). A non-Western philosophical voice in the dialogue and "in-between" material.
The seven dimensions of religion — a worldview-analysis grid for describing any tradition even-handedly. Structural backbone for cross-tradition profiling.
Thesis advisor at Harvard Divinity School; scholar of William James and American pragmatism. His reading of James — religion understood "almost fully within the adaptive, evolutionary, environmental modern frame" — is the license for the whole project to exist as a unity of scholarship and practice.
Field-education supervisor (Summer 2026), at his research-and-venture studio Universal Machine Inc.; MIT Media Lab PhD in human–computer interaction. Founder of the Hikmah Lab, which mined some 1,400 texts of early Middle-Eastern history into a citation network of roughly 50,000 scholars — methodologically parallel digital-humanities work to this project's corpus-and-citation method.
Shared by Saquib: the Dynamic Abstractions Group — researchers (Adobe, Toronto, Montréal, Stanford) building dynamic, interactive mediums for thinking; and Time Curves (Bach et al., IEEE TVCG 2016) — folding a timeline into a curve so moments that resemble each other sit close together, to picture how something evolves over time.
How to read the tags. Each moss pill names what the project takes from a scholar; a gold pill marks a load-bearing or canonical position; an italic contested pill and italic "foil" mark positions the project tracks but defines itself against (the perennialists, spiritual-intelligence, top-down convergence). Convergence between traditions is read as moves that rhyme — an empirical finding, never a shared essence assumed in advance. Where someone straddles two sections, they're placed by their strongest contribution and noted in the body. A few entries carry a ↳ synthesis note link to the reading-week write-up behind them.
Gathered from the Lamberth reading notes, the methodology chapter drafts, the Grammar of Meaning essays, the Romans-tree edition guide, and the project's stated lineage (Brand · Diderot · Alexander · Meadows · Smil). A living, additive reference — corrections and additions welcome.
scholars · v2 · 2026-06-19 · WIP