he idea that spiritual transformation is a subject worthy of modern scientific research has been around since the groundbreaking publication of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. But, it’s safe to say, the subject never received such sustained scrutiny from scholars across a wide range of academic disciplines until now, a century later, with the Foundation-initiated Spiritual Transformation Scientific Research Program.

Started in 2001, the Program culminated in an April 2006 conference at the University of California at Berkeley where scholars presented the fruits of 22 separate research projects devoted to the phenomenon of spiritual transformation. (Click here for a list of Spiritual Transformation research grant recipients.) That conference, anchored by a national poll that found nearly half of all Americans report a life-changing spiritual experience, garnered national media attention as participants delivered report after report detailing the rewards of subjecting religious experience to scientific examination. Studies ranged from the more predictable—the health benefits of spiritual transformation—to those that took advantage of the latest technological advances—by, for example, monitoring Roman Catholic nuns’ brain waves as they relived mystical experiences.

“We want to understand the processes of meditative and contemplative practices because of their association with health benefits and well-being and a sense of peace,” Michael Spezio, a post-doctoral student in social neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology told the San Diego Tribune. “There are limits, but brain science, neuroscience, has tools at its disposal to measure the effects of these experiences that we so seek to understand.”

Dr. Solomon Katz, the Spiritual Transformation Scientific Research Program’s principal investigator, attributes technological breakthroughs with giving such work added weight in the scientific community. “Partly, it is a maturation of the scientific paradigm,” he says, noting that funding, too, was an issue.

“It was 40 years ago as a graduate student that I got really interested in this. Not because I had a spiritual transformation of my own but because of a colleague’s work on revitalization movements where whole communities are changed by a prophet-like leader,” says Katz, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania where he is also the Director of the Krogman Center for Research in Child Growth and Development. “At the time, we did some research on spiritual transformation but could never get funding for it.”

By the time of its completion in 2006, the Spiritual Transformation Scientific Research Program had devoted about $3.3 million on various research projects. At Sir John Templeton’s urging, over $1 million of that came in the form of matching grants to study a phenomenon often labeled “born again” in Christian circles.

One of the centerpieces of the project was a nationwide poll conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, which has been tracking Americans social attitudes for over three decades. The poll on spiritual transformation found that over half of Americans have had one; that 60 percent of them had one before age 30; and that the event retains for years its singular importance for those surveyed.

The next step, says Katz, is to embark on a longitudinal study that would track spiritual transformation over the course of subjects’ lives. He has already approached the Foundation. “We’re talking about it. The question is how to do it in an economical way,” he says. “We’ll need to leverage it with other, ongoing studies.”

www.metanexus.net/spiritual_transformation