Pioneering Contemplative Studies, with Hal Roth

Professor Pierce Salguero sits down with Professor Harold Roth, Director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. Hal is the person who coined the term “contemplative studies,” and he has been a pioneer in this emerging academic field. Together, we explore the benefits of combining third-person critical study with first-person contemplative approaches, as well as the entrenched resistance to this kind of scholarship within religious studies. Along the way, we touch on contemplative education, the need to overcome dualistic thinking, and Hal’s transcendent vision of how contemplative studies can benefit humanity.

If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in multidisciplinary conversations about Asian religious, medical, healing, and mystical traditions, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts.

If you would be willing to help support the pod so we can pay our bills, please look us up on Substack and become a member! Each month our guests share downloadable PDFs of articles, book chapters, and other materials in our members area. Check it out!

One last thing: we are planning an “Ask Me Anything” episode in the future, so reach out via Substack or my website here, and let me know your questions. 

Resources relevant to this episode:

• Brown University’s Contemplative Studies Initiative
• Richard Wilhelm, The I Ching or Book of Changes (1967)
• Harold Roth et al, The Essential Huainanzi (2012)
• Harold Roth, The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism (2021)
• R.H. Sharf, “The rhetoric of experience and the study of religion” (2000)
• Roth, “Critical Subjectivity in the New Field of Contemplative Studies” Yin-Cheng Journal of Contemporary Buddhism (2026) 
• B. Alan Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness(2000)
• Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (2001)
• International Society for Contemplative Research 
• Contemplative Education Network

Subscribe on Substack to unlock our members-only benefits, including all of the following:

• Roth, “Against Cognitive Imperialism A Call for a Non-Ethnocentric Approach to 
• Cognitive Science and Religious Studies” (2008) [PDF]
• Roth, “Contemplative Learning and Inquiry Across Disciplines” (2014
• Hal’s list of Contemplative Studies programs [PDF]
• Hal’s interviews with Joseph Needham, Benjamin Schwartz, KC Chang, AC Graham, Sarah Allan, and other famous Sinologists [MP3]

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. See&