PhD, Psychology, University of Alberta, 2004 BA Honours, Religious Studies, University of Alberta, 1997

Technology & culture: modern Western society has become pervasively shaped at every level by technology in a historically unprecedented manner. What are the effects and consequences of this development in the present on our communities and on our psyche? What hopes and anxieties for our future? How does it impact our belonging to our past and transform our relation to our historical traditions? History, tradition, & the future: our globalizing moment is, following Karl Jaspers' notion of "pivotal moments" in world history, undergoing a second "Axial Age". How is our current time repeating, fulfilling, failing, or diverging from the first Axial Age of 800-200 BC, when the 'shape' of world history is seeded and the "world religions" initiated? What lessons are we to learn from that world history to address contemporary challenges? In what ways can our belonging to tradition both root us in the past and enable us to move forward into the future with courage and hope? Spirituality & contemplation: at the heart of all myth and religion lies the mystery of human participation in the sacred transcendent, that shapes our spiritual lives and which in Christianity has been explored through the practices and disciplines of the contemplative tradition. How to live in that way today? How to retrieve the spiritual practices of the Christian tradition in our contemporary age? How to engage from this tradition in meaningful dialogue with the other great religions and traditions of the world? Ecopsychology: our current historical moment is one of ecological peril. The Anthropocene is the era of the Sixth Extinction, globalization exacerbates climate change, and world population continues to grow, all of which raises acutely the issue of how to live on the Earth and how to be in right relation to the natural world. What truths of wildness have we forgotten? What wisdom of indigenous peoples and from the great world religions and traditions must we recover? How to restore, through and beyond our traditions to which we belong, our deeper belonging to our earthly home?