What is "spiritual expertise?" How does it contribute to individual and societal flourishing, and how do criteria for this kind of intelligence vary across communities?
Anthropologist Dr. Anna Corwin joins this episode of Stories of Impact podcast to discuss her research focused on how communities around the world define and cultivate "spiritual expertise. "
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"Dr. Anna Corwin is an associate professor and chair of a women's spirituality program within the religion and philosophy department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. But she’s quick to point out that she’s not a theologian, she’s an anthropologist. It was when she was doing her postdoctoral work at Stanford that she became connected to the Diverse Intelligences initiative. Diverse Intelligences researchers collaboratively examine the variety of intelligence on the planet, whether plant, animal, human, alien, artificial, and that made Dr. Corwin see new possibilities for her own unique scientific interest, which had been previously focused on the wisdom of Catholic nuns."
With support from Templeton World Charity Foundation, Dr. Corwin designed a three-year cross cultural study to help her develop a Framework of Religious Intelligence. The study was limited to Christianity, but designed to cover culturally vastly different places. The four study locations included an American convent with Franciscan Catholic nuns; a community of Greek Orthodox monks on Mount Athos; a charismatic Catholic community, including lay folks in Uganda; and, finally, missionized Catholic indigenous Runa from the Ecuadorian Amazon. Dr. Corwin’s central question was: What are “the ways of knowing, perspectives, and capacities that arise through interaction with the divine?”
The methods of the study included interviews, surveys, video analysis, and community-based expertise identification.
She found that spiritual experts across diverse communities shared some common qualities, such as the capacity to shift their attention from immediate crises to broader perspectives, find creative solutions to problems, and effectively resolve both internal and social conflicts. However, each culture had its own distinct criteria. For example, the Runa community in the Ecuadorian Amazon valued medicinal plant use, vivid dreaming, and healing skills, whereas Catholic nuns in the U.S. emphasized compassion, independent thinking, and inspiring calm in others. Not all spiritual experts fit the calm, peaceful stereotype – Runa experts are seen as powerful but also dangerous. Spiritual experts are not necessarily community leaders. Many use humor as a tool to shift perspectives and resolve tensions. These experts are often detached from outcomes, accepting failure without resistance, and they tend to be quiet observers, rarely intervening but highly respected when they do. "Some folks might worry that having differences would be bad, like, 'Oh no, is there a thing that is religious intelligence? What if there is no thing here? What if there's no there there,'" Dr. Corwin shares. "But I actually think this is extraordinarily important and makes an argument for why cross-cultural research is important. If I only looked at my US data, we would not be capturing what spiritual intelligence is for Ecuadorian Runa folks."
Listen in to the episode to hear how Dr. Corwin found:
"The skills of shifting the horizon of attention, the skills of resolving internal and social tensions: these things are incredibly critically important. I think that this moment in the world is a really particularly ripe moment to be looking at spiritual intelligence, not because I have a particular religious or spiritual viewpoint, but because I think that the skill sets that we are seeing here are particularly useful for navigating large scale social change, social shifts," says Dr. Corwin. "We are at a moment climate-wise, we're at a moment in terms of the global political climate, there's a real potential advantage to the kind of skills that we see lining up with how folks are understanding religious intelligence."
Tune in to the full episode with the above player and view show notes here.
Learn more about the TWCF-funded project: Encountering the Divine: Developing a Framework of Religious Intelligence
View TWCF's Diverse Intelligences priority.
Built upon the award-winning video series of the same name, Templeton World Charity Foundation’s “Stories of Impact” podcast features stories of new scientific research on human flourishing that translate discoveries into practical tools. Bringing a mix of curiosity, compassion, and creativity, journalist Richard Sergay and producer Tavia Gilbert shine a spotlight on the human impact at the heart of cutting-edge social and scientific research projects supported by TWCF.
