Overview

Christopher White received his PhD in Religious Studies from Harvard University, where he studied religion and culture in modern Europe and America.

He is particularly interested in religion and science, spirituality and “unchurched” religion, new religious movements, electronic media and popular culture.  He has published articles on these and other subjects in scholarly journals and edited books, including articles in Religion in American Culture and the American Historical Review.  His first book, Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance (California: University of California Press, 2009) examined how modern Europeans and Americans used psychological and medical insights to fashion new, more scientific ways of testing, analyzing and sometimes even fostering religious trances, visions and experiences.  His second book, Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions (Harvard University Press, 2018), examines the cultural history of the idea that the universe has hidden dimensions, spaces and worlds.