Author: Chas. H. Barfoot

ISBN: 979-8-9875140-8-5

About the Author:

Chas. H. Barfoot received his education at Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, The Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and the University of Birmingham in the UK. Since 2005, Barfoot has taught over 28 different courses across four campuses of Arizona State University (ASU). An award-winning teaching professor, Barfoot averages a thousand students a year. In addition to his teaching, Barfoot has authored Aimee Semple McPherson and the Making of Modern Pentecostalism, 1890-1926, which the late David Martin described as “definitive”, and Harvey Cox characterized, as “the book of record.” Presently, Barfoot is working on several writing projects including a new edition of Religion in America, co-authored with Julia Corbett-Hemeyer.

In 2016 Barfoot’s mentor, Harvey Cox from Harvard, was in residence at ASU. Cox’s visit in many ways inspired and changed Barfoot’s course on Comparative Mysticism. In addition to surveying multiple religions, Comparative Mysticism now centers on William James, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass and Harvard University as the “hot house” of American mysticism. The course concludes by examining the recent use of psychedelic drugs to treat chronic illness and the terminally ill. The six modules of the course include the following topics: “The 1960s and The Harvard Experiment,” “Harvard: The Academic Hot House of Mysticism,” “William James: The Pioneer,” “Mysticism in World Religions,” “Towards a Secular, Scientific Understanding of Mysticism,” and “The Mystic Future?”