Tanya Marie Luhrmann, the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department, will be at Yale Divinity School to give the Ensign Lecture on Thursday, November 14 at 5:30pm EST, in Niebuhr Hall. Her talk is entitled, “William James in Accra: How the Experience of God Shifts in Different Settings” and will draw on fieldwork with new charismatic churches in the US and in Ghana, exploring the way prayer and spiritual experience are shaped by local theories about the mind.
The lecture is free and open to the public. The talk be webcast live at:
http://new.livestream.com/yaledivinityschool.
Luhrmann is a frequent writer and speaker. Her books include Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, (Harvard, 1989); The Good Parsi (Harvard 1996); Of Two Minds (Knopf 2000) and When God Talks Back (Knopf 2012). She is a contributor to popular publications, including The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Psychology Today. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a Guggenheim award in 2007.
In general, her work focuses on the way that ideas held in the mind come to seem externally real to people, and the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience. Her current work in public psychiatry focuses on homeless psychotic women in Chicago, and the cultural meaning of being “crazy” which leads them to reject the offer of help that our society makes, and the experience of hearing distressing voices in San Mateo, California; Accra, Ghana and Chennai, India. She has focused here on the way that culture shapes the experience of psychosis.
Visit Luhrmann’s website to learn more about her research, books, and to find links to videos, including her speech to the Society of Vineyard Scholars in 2011.
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