EP 346: Deepak Chopra-Jeffrey Epstein Connections & the Spirituality Industry Crisis w/Dr. Ann Gleig
Release Date: 04/26/2026
EP 357: Khemethaka Nunnery, Daw Gunawati, and pāramī w/Dr. M.K. Long
The Classical Ideas Podcast
MK Long is a historian and ethnographer of Buddhism and gender. Her current project highlights vernacular auto/biographical writings of Buddhist women in Myanmar, examining their rhetorical strategies of self-presentation and how they theorize Buddhist authority, temporality, and belonging. Long's study of vernacular literature of the 1980s-90s foregrounds its conditions of production, not only its relationship to Buddhist biographical and narrative traditions, but also authoritarian censorship, state-driven reorganization of monastic institutions, and shifting citizenship regimes. This work...
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EP 356: Buddhism and Experimental Music w/Dr. Julian Butterfield
The Classical Ideas Podcast
Julian Butterfield is a scholar of medieval Chinese Buddhist literature with a special interest in how Mahāyāna Buddhist narratives depict and solicit feeling. His current monograph project recovers the aesthetic and affective dimensions of Lotus Sūtra devotion in fifth-to-eighth-century China, arguing that the transmission of this pivotal Buddhist scripture relied heavily on the cultivation of strong emotions among practitioners. A secondary, public-facing research project investigates the interactions of Buddhist media and musical experimentation from the nineteenth century to...
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EP 355: Buddhist Charities in Urban Vietnam w/Dr. Sara Swenson
The Classical Ideas Podcast
Sara Swenson works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. Her current research explores how grassroots charity volunteers in Vietnam adapt Buddhist values and practices to navigate ethical struggles amid rapid urbanization and she is the author of "Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charities in Urban Vietnam" from Oxford University Press! Visit Sara Swenson online: Visit Sacred Writes:
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EP 354: Transforming the American Sangha w/Dr. Nalika Gajaweera
The Classical Ideas Podcast
Nalika Gajaweera (Research Affiliate, Walter H. Capps Center, University of California, Santa Barbara; PhD, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, 2013) is an anthropologist of Buddhism, race, and ethics, with a focus on community well-being and resilience. Her current book manuscript, Transforming the American Sangha, funded by the Kataly Foundation, is an ethnography of the Insight Meditation movement in North America, focused on the efforts of practitioners of color to raise awareness of oppressive racial conditions in these communities. Her doctoral research examined how Buddhist...
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EP 353: Western Esoteric Tradition and "Scientific Progress" with Dr. Tara Isabella Burton
The Classical Ideas Podcast
Tara Isabella Burton (DPhil, University of Oxford; Visiting Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University; Visiting Research Fellow, Institutional Flourishing Lab, Catholic University of America) is a theologian and culture critic, and the author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (Public Affairs, 2022) and Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (Public Affairs, 2020). She is a regular contributor on religion and culture to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and has...
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EP 352: A Perturbed System Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World w/ Dr. Susannah Crockford
The Classical Ideas Podcast
A moving study of how religion shapes Western climate discourse. Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we’ve built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why? In A Perturbed System, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we must understand the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis, a result of Christian colonialism that we (religious or not) still struggle to describe without religious...
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EP 351: Dr. Ira Helderman on Adverse Meditation Effects
The Classical Ideas Podcast
Ira Helderman PhD, LPC (Adjunct Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture, Vanderbilt University; PhD, Religious Studies, Vanderbilt University, 2016) studies how psychotherapists’ definitions of what is and is not religious shape their understandings of caregiving, health, and illness. His first book, Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (University of North Carolina Press 2019), is the first comprehensive examination of the surprisingly diverse ways that psychotherapists have approached Buddhist traditions. Helderman publishes in...
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EP 350: The Wounded Church: Tending to the Harm within Catholicism w/Dr. Annie Selak
The Classical Ideas Podcast
Dr. Annie Selak (she/her/hers) is an expert in feminist ecclesiology. She studies wounds in the church, or moments where the church fails to live into its mission and causes harm. Racism, sexism, and the clergy sex abuse crisis are examples of the church failing to credibly be church. Guided by a feminist methodology, Selak integrates the lived experience of women with a robust vision for the church. Selak serves as a Visiting Scholar in the Center on Faith and Justice while working as a campus minister at a local independent school. She earned her Ph.D. in systematic theology...
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EP 349: The YouTube Prosperity Gospel w/Dr. Kaitlyn Ugoretz
The Classical Ideas Podcast
Kaitlyn Ugoretz (Lecturer, Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nanzan University, Japan; PhD, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, in progress) is an anthropologist of religion focused on the globalization of Japanese Shinto practices through popular culture such as anime, video games, and Marie Kondo’s decluttering. The Associate Editor of The Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, and a member of the Sacred Writes 2021 public scholarship training cohort, Prof. Ugoretz also promotes public scholarship on Japanese religions through her...
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EP 348: Dr. Kira Ganga Kieffer on "Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America"
The Classical Ideas Podcast
is a scholar of American religions, history, culture, and politics with a PhD in Religious Studies from Boston University. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University. Kieffer's first book, (Princeton University Press, May 19, 2026) examines the spiritual and religious roots of vaccine resistance in U.S. history. In general, her work examines contestations over authority through the interactions between religion, alternative health movements, politics, and consumption. Order...
info_outlineAnn Gleig (Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies, University of Central Florida; PhD, Rice University, 2010) studies spirituality emerging from the encounter between Buddhism and American culture, particularly meditation and mindfulness. The author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019); and co-editor with Scott A. Mitchell of The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, she has published widely about how the incorporation of psychotherapeutic and social justice frameworks have transformed American Buddhist practices. A recipient of a Sacred Writes media partnership to write for Religion Dispatches, Dr. Gleig’s public-facing work has also appeared in The Conversation and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
Ann Gleig will collaborate with Nalika Gajawira on a comparative ethnographic study of how Buddhist communities adopt and adapt popular spiritual exercises such as “secular” mindfulness and yoga classes within a wider Buddhist framework. Their work aims to illustrate the processes, frameworks and relationships that can enable more responsible relationships between specific religious communities and the word of spiritual wellness practices.
Ann Gleig, “The Deepak Chopra-Jeffrey Epstein friendship tells of a spirituality industry in
crisis,” Religion News Service:
https://religionnews.com/2026/03/06/the-deepak-chopra-jeffrey-
epstein-tells-of-a-spirituality-industry-in-crisis/
Ann Gleig and Brenna Artinger, “The Buddhist Culture Wars #BuddhistCultureWars:
BuddhaBros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas," Journal of Global Buddhism Vol 22:
1(2021) https://www.globalbuddhism.org/article/view/1298
Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, “Supporting Survivors of Abuse,” Abuse in Buddhism: Facing
It, Preventing It and Healing From It, Dharmadatta Community
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Tlvm5gq-G0
Ann Gleig, Amy Langenberg and Sarah Jacoby, “Reflecting on Heartwood/Northwestern
Symposium on Sexual Violence in Buddhism: Centering Survivors Voices,” The Shiloh Project
https://shilohproject.blog/reflection-on-heartwood-symposium-on-sexual-violence-in-buddhism-
centering-survivors-voices/
Ann Gleig, Talking About Cults: Abuse and the Study of New Religious Movements:
https://www.ugapress.org/9780820377902/talking-about-cults/
Association for Spiritual Integrity (ASI) https://www.spiritual-integrity.org/
Seek Safely: https://seeksafely.org/