Research
Forty-two funded grants and $9.9 million in external support, across a portfolio held together by one question.
How do religious and spiritual practices shape human flourishing and health—and how can those findings be translated into programs, policies, platforms, and communities that help people thrive, especially in an age of AI?
Every project in this portfolio is a version of that question.
Some ask the first half: what actually happens to people, measurably, when they pray or worship or wrestle with doubt.
Some ask the second: how findings move out of journals and into the hands of a clinician, a pastor, a program director, or a product team.
Holding both halves together is the point. Research that never reaches practice is just a citation. Practice that is not built on evidence is just a guess.
Current Projects
Worship 2.0
Co-PI with Patty Van Cappellen, Duke University. Templeton World Charity Foundation, $500,000, 2024–2027. How communal worship practices shape emotion, connection, and well-being, and what changes when worship is mediated by technology.
Religion, Spirituality, and the Social Determinants of Health
Co-PI with Crystal Park, University of Connecticut. John Templeton Foundation, $260,000, 2025–2027. Positioning religion and spirituality within the social forces that shape population health, and producing a practitioner toolkit for health systems and community organizations.
The Science of Religious and Spiritual Exercises (SoRSE)
Research Consultant. Templeton World Charity Foundation, $260,000, 2025–2028. Building and disseminating the evidence base on which spiritual practices produce measurable benefit, for whom, and under what conditions.
Conectere
Research Consultant, with Co-PIs Sarah Ann Bixler and Almeda Wright, Eastern Mennonite University. Lilly Endowment, $1.25 million, 2023–2028. Research and evaluation design for a national initiative on attachment, caregiving, and family formation.
Areas of Inquiry
The portfolio spans a set of related questions, pursued across two decades.
Attachment to the sacred
How people experience the divine and its impact on mental health.
Religious struggle
What happens when faith becomes a source of distress, and what helps.
Spiritual practices
Which practices produce measurable change in well-being, and how.
Trauma and meaning
How communities draw on spiritual resources under acute stress.
Virtue development
Character strengths that predict flourishing and their cultivation.
Technology and AI
How digital mediation changes traditional formation practices.
Measurement, methods, and open science
Sharing resources freely and using the highest-quality measures and methods to inform science, practice, and policy.
Caring for the vulnerable and marginalized
Supporting the health and flourishing of people who face various forms of stigma, discrimination, and disadvantage.
Publications
120+ publications, including 95 peer-reviewed journal articles.
Handbook of Positive Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality (Springer, coedited)
Attachment, Religion, and Spirituality (Cambridge University Press, coauthored)
Full publication list and master CV
Google Scholar
ORCID
Research supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, and the Lilly Endowment, with institutional partners including Duke University, the University of Connecticut, and Wheaton College.
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