In a secular age, where do people turn for meaning, belonging, and purpose?
Even in contexts around the world where institutional religion is in decline, people are not becoming less spiritual. They are searching, experimenting, and assembling new forms of community in the vacuum left by institutional breakdown. This context has given rise to spiritual innovators of all sorts. And many of those who are trying to create new forms of spiritual life, both within and outside traditional religious institutions—yoga teachers, digital sangha builders, grief workers, ritual designers—are doing so with very little support. They see the beauty of offering spiritual care to people in crisis, but also deal with the burdens of loneliness, burnout, ethical ambiguity—and all that can go wrong with such ventures.
In this episode, I speak with Casper Ter Kuile and Angie Thurston, co-founders of Sacred Design Lab, whose pioneering work has shaped how scholars, philanthropists, and spiritual practitioners understand this emerging ecology.
Casper Ter Kuile is the author of The Power of Ritual and co-founder of Sacred Design Lab. He also co-created the hit podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text and co-founded Nearness. Angie Thurston is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Sacred Design Lab. She has worked with hundreds of innovative leaders, finding new ways to address spiritual longings amid religious change. Angie has co-written eight widely read reports on the evolving landscape of community and spiritual life, and is currently an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.
Drawing on interviews with spiritual innovators across the U.S., Brazil, Kenya, Egypt, the UAE, India, and Japan, Casper and Angie’s latest research offers a deeply informed view of both what’s breaking down and what is breaking open.
In our conversation, we discuss what led them to start Sacred Design Lab. We then explore what spiritual innovation means, what makes spiritual innovations succeed or fail, what the global landscape of spiritual innovation looks like, and what risks or pitfalls come with spiritual innovation.
They argue that spiritual innovation is not about trend-chasing or novelty for its own sake. It is the practical work of meeting enduring human needs for meaning, purpose. As Angie puts it, spiritual innovation is fundamentally a design question: “How do we help people flourish when inherited forms no longer fit the world we live in?”
One of the surprising discoveries that stands out to me from their work is that spiritual innovators want elders. Even many of those who left institutional religion are interested in mentorship and received wisdom from clergy, despite their distrust of these institutions.
You can listen to our conversation wherever you get your podcasts (part 1 here and part 2 here) or watch the full video or read an unedited transcript below.
Brandon: All right. Casper, Angie, it’s a pleasure to have you both on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Casper: Thanks for having us.
Angie: Thanks for having us.
Brandon: Yeah, you’re welcome. Well, to get started, I had sent you guys a question which I normally ask my podcast guests to begin with, which is: Could you share a memory of beauty from your childhoods that linger till today? I wonder what cropped up in your minds as I asked this question. Perhaps, Angie, we could start with you.
Angie: I would love to, and it’s such a nice question. Thank you, Brandon.
So I grew up in San Francisco. I was four years old during the earthquake of 1989 which, of course, in and of itself, I would not necessarily describe with that word beauty, but there is a specific memory that I have from that day. For context, my nuclear family was fairly isolated. I didn’t grow up with much family around, and we didn’t have much community either. But that night, all the power went out in San Francisco. We were lucky enough that our house was mostly okay. And because of that, there were a few people in my parents’ life who came over that evening. I remember falling asleep and, in the next room, my parents were there with some friends by candlelight. They were laughing and talking and sort of whispering. I just had this feeling that I hadn’t had much in my life to date as a kid of — I guess I would say it was a feeling of belonging. It was a feeling of just that sort of subtle web of life and connection that I was part of and they were part of. I think part of the beauty of it, to me, was this feeling that I didn’t have to do anything. I was just there in my bed as a four-year-old, and I could just fall asleep. This set of relationships, this love, was happening anyway. There was just sort of a givenness to it. I still remember that, that sense inside of myself, from that particular experience. The feeling that it has is one of beauty.
Brandon: Wow! Extraordinary. Thank you. Casper, what came to your mind?
Casper: Well, Brandon, I have to thank you. Angie and I have worked together for 12 years, and it’s rare that I hear a story that I haven’t heard before. But that’s lovely, Anj. Thanks for sharing that.
Brandon, I grew up in the UK. I went to a Waldorf school as a child. I don’t know how much our listeners will be familiar with Steiner education, but it’s a very ritual-heavy, nature-based, fascinating theological project of combining Christianity with Hindu reincarnation. Very interesting thing to explore that. But one of the gifts of growing up in a Waldorf school was that they encouraged parents—and so my mother did this in our home—to have a nature table. What that looked like was, in the hallway, the entryway of our home — I grew up with three sisters, and we had lodges living upstairs. It was a big house filled with people. In the entryway, there was this little table. Each season—really, every few weeks—it changed. There were postcards of, if it was in the summer season, there would be beaches. In the autumn, there would be beautiful leaves that were changing color. In Advent season, there would be 24 stars that little mini-Joseph and Mary would walk over—kind of one star every day towards the manger of Bethlehem.
And so it was just this sense of living in time. I think that’s, for me, where the beauty really was. It was the visual of flowers, or rocks, or crystals, or something. It was a constant reminder of where we were in the natural life cycle of the earth and its seasons. And so, yeah, that’s something. I recently moved house and was having conversation with my husband about what makes a house a home. And I was like, “We must have a nature table. That’s non-negotiable.”
Brandon: Oh, wow. Well, that’s great. That’s really quite a testament to your school there and to the Waldorf method. These themes of both belonging and of ritual, perhaps, are so central to the work you all are doing at Sacred Design Lab.
How did you two meet, and how did you come to start this initiative, Sacred Design Lab?
Angie: Casper and I met in 2013 in our very first week—perhaps one of our first days—at Harvard Divinity School. Well, Casper had come in to get a public policy degree at the Kennedy School, so he had been there at the University for a little while. But I was newly arrived, and we were both in the same required seminar, an introduction to ministry studies. It was in that seminar that we had the requirement to share our spiritual autobiographies, just each of us sharing our origin story and how our lives intersected with religion and spirituality.
The way I remember it is that, when Casper shared his spiritual autobiography, I basically pounced on him after class and was like, “You see what I see. We need to work together.” Basically, what that was was that both of us had come of age outside of religion in the sort of formal, institutional sense, and both of us had a real sense that there were a lot of needs—which I think we would both now describe as spiritual needs, spiritual longings—that were occurring for people who did not have a sense of religious identity or religious community, and that we wanted to, in some ways, serve people who were feeling that way. And so, yeah, we became friends, but pretty quickly — I think even when we would have dinner together, we would have an agenda. So it became quickly quite clear that we had work to do together.
Brandon: Wow.
Angie: I don’t know what you would add or change, Casper, about that narrative.
Casper: No, I think that’s exactly right. Yeah, I would only say that Angie and I, as we became friends, just started to learn together. We started to interview people who were doing spiritual or religious things in secular places. Our interest was really trying to understand this landscape, especially of our generation of millennials at that point, who were outside of religion but still doing religious things. And so, we ended up writing this—I hesitate to say this to an academic like yourself—public paper that was really aimed at a general readership, to try and illustrate not what the dominant narrative was at the time, which really was a decline of religion, but, from our perspective, really a transformation of religion—so that people were still being spiritual, doing spiritual things, but in places like CrossFit, or maker spaces, or the workplace, or artistic communities.
And so, we’ve always had this kind of dual role—which I’ve loved about working with Angie—of both being students of what’s happening and having a leg into the academy and into research, but also really as practitioners. There’s people who are really invested in this personally and creating projects, creating interventions, creating media that speak to that landscape at the same time. Yeah, we keep finding ways to work together.
Brandon: Astounding. Casper, you had also started a very influential podcast on Harry Potter. Could you say a word about how that fit into all of this?
Casper: Well, this is a great example of one of those practitioner projects. Another classmate of ours, Vanessa Zoltan, in Divinity School, and I became friends. She was doing this fascinating writing about reading a sacred text. She grew up as an atheist Jew—that would be the language she used—where belief in God was not part of the picture, but the practices of religious life certainly were, and sacred reading was a big part of that. But she didn’t want to read the Torah, so she was reading Jane Eyre as a sacred text with one of our beloved professors, Stephanie Paulsell. I found this quite intriguing. I was like, “What is sacred reading?” I didn’t know anything about Lectio Divina, or the Ignatian imagination practices, or havruta, or Pardes from Jewish practice.
And so, I went along to this little group that she was hosting on a Wednesday night with three or four women, who were reading a chapter of Jane Eyre, taking a sentence and doing Lectio Divina with it, and having these amazing conversations about mental health, heartbreak, love, and courage. I said to Vanessa, “This is really awesome. We should do it with a book people actually read.” I mean, no disrespect to the Frontistē. But what that led to was, it kind of paired with my own exploration of not growing up Christian and having to take an Introduction to Hebrew Bible in church and New Testament class, finding it interesting but, at the same time, not feeling like it was my text to interrogate. Or I didn’t have a relationship with it. That’s changed now. But at that point, I was really looking for, what are the epic stories? What are the myths, the legends, that I feel like I have a right to engage with, to interpret? And so I was interested in Lord of the Rings. I was interested in Game of Thrones. I was interested in Harry Potter. And so, those two kinds of influences came together.
We were extremely lucky—always go to the conference that you’re invited to—because I met this random guy at a conference who happened to be the man in charge of the homepage of iTunes at that point. And so, when we launched the podcast, having run it as an in-person class for a year, when we launched the podcast, I sent it to this guy, and he was like, “Oh, this is cool. I’m going to put you on the homepage.” That ended up attracting just an enormous audience. What happened was that we really became sort of Chaplains to a fandom. And so, that podcast has been running for nearly 10 years now, and it will close next year, in 2026. Having read through all the books twice, chapter by chapter, it led to hundreds of local reading groups that would do Lectio Divina with the Harry Potter books. We run secular pilgrimages now. There’s a thriving digital community. So it’s been amazing to see how people who would never go looking for spiritual practices, they were looking for the comfort and the connection of the story that they loved. We always say we don’t read it as entertainment; we read it not as instruction per se, but as an opportunity to mirror back into our own lives the big questions about values, about how to live a good life. The texts and these practices particularly really help you use the text as a mirror to ask yourself big questions.
Brandon: Amazing, amazing. How did this idea for the Sacred Design Lab then come about in the midst of all this? What was it that, you know, spurred you to actually create this thing, and then what are you trying to do with it now?
Angie: Well, Casper alluded to this report we wrote, this public paper, How We Gather, back in 2015. It’s worth re-emphasizing that we were just grad students at the time, right? We had some shared priorities about the kind of work we wanted to do. I would say both of us were really looking at these innovative communities that seemed to be meeting needs that, perhaps in many cases, religion—both historically and currently—would meet. But the kind of people in our orbit, especially at the time, we were looking at millennials who tended to be religiously unaffiliated or uncomfortably affiliated. We were asking, where are they going to find meaning, belonging, and purpose?
And so, that led to this little report, How We Gather. But it also led us to get to know a whole host of these innovative community leaders around the United States. And what kept happening—I had trained before that as a playwright. These folks who were running fitness communities, arts communities, and justice movements, they seemed to be dissimilar, and yet it was as if they had a shared script about the kinds of work they were doing and the ways that it was touching people and meeting them. What we found is that these leaders, in many respects, were acting in a sort of pastoral role for the people in their communities, even though their communities were nominally secular. And so, we began to learn about their needs. One of the primary needs that we noticed amongst them was that they felt awfully lonely in their leadership, and that they also felt under resourced in the dimensions of their leadership that were addressing these deeper needs amongst the people in their care.
And so, we started gathering these leaders. At first, we were gathering secular leaders. Then we started gathering leaders whose communities actually did have a religious affiliation—or where the leader themselves might, but where the community was not. It kind of looked more like these innovative secular communities than it did your traditional, congregational model, for instance. So this was things like people meeting in laundromats and washing clothes for those who might be experiencing homelessness—as a kind of expression of modern-day foot washing, right? Or Muslim small groups meeting in living rooms—at the time, online Buddhist sanghas before COVID, and everyone going online. So that became a sort of network that Casper and I were cultivating amongst these leaders. We’ve come to call these folks spiritual innovators. At the time, we didn’t have that language yet. And so that’s one big strand that, I would say, has run through our work and still does to this day. That was some of the impetus behind founding Sacred Design Lab.
But the other was that, as we continue getting to know these innovative leaders and working with them, we also received an unexpected response from a lot of institutions. At first, these were religious institutions—everything from denominations to large-scale congregations and foundations. People were basically asking, what is going on with rising generations? In many cases, they were experiencing institutional decline, and so they wanted to talk to us and understand what was going on. Then sometimes secular organizations would be encountering the same challenges, the cultural challenges of, “Oh, we have this huge rise in loneliness and a sense of isolation. We have this rise in mental health—it challenges—and people experiencing this kind of ennui, and in some cases, devastation. What’s going on with that, and how do we respond in a secular landscape? We were sort of saying, well, actually, there’s a lot of wisdom in religion about this, right? So we found ourselves in a bridge position. And so, when we graduated from Divinity School in 2016, we said, okay. Well, I think Casper and I sort of looked at each other. “Are we going to do this for real? Are we going to try to do this as our job?” It’s been a long and meandering road since then of how we’ve made it work, but ultimately, we did. We found Sacred Design Lab with our colleague, Sue, about seven years ago now—to really try to bring together this body of work and see what we could meaningfully contribute.
Brandon: Could you say a little bit about — I mean, you talked about sort of these fundamental unmet needs that you’re trying to address. Say a bit more about the design and the lab aspects of what you’re trying to do.
Casper: Well, there’s few parts of that. One is that Angie and I just like to do a lot of interesting things. Using a word like lab allows us to — but in all seriousness, it allowed us to partner with very different types of groups for projects that all touched on these same questions, but in very different contexts. For example, we worked with the Episcopal bishop in Chicago to host a liturgy lab. This was a small convening in which we brought together secular experienced designers who worked as museum curators or hosted festivals, like music festivals, together with Episcopal liturgists who were steeped both in the scholarship of liturgy, but also in the practice of it in Episcopal congregations. That led to some fascinating insights of applying this idea of spiritual innovation, of how do we meet those enduring needs in ways that really resonate with audiences that won’t necessarily walk into an Episcopal Church.
One insight that I’ll never forget is Ida Benedetto, who is an amazing experienced designer who lives here in Brooklyn, not too far away from me. She had done some research looking at, of all things, wilderness retreats, funerals, and sex parties. Her insight was that, for transformation to occur, you needed an element of risk. When she shared that in this group of Episcopal liturgists, I remember Patrick—oh, gosh— Mahoney, I think is his last name, the former dean at Sir John the Divine, saying, “My goodness. As a liturgist, I’m nearly always designing for safety. What would it be like to design for risk in liturgy?” So those kinds of conversations don’t happen by themselves. And so, that was one element of the lab.
We’ve also created, in partnership with the Well Being Trust, a foundation that came out of the healthcare sector that was really interested in understanding, okay, we understand social health. We understand mental health. What is spiritual health? Can you help us think through what does that look like? And so, we both did a bunch of research and then created our own personal inventory and sort of a mini self-analysis tool that you could use to just get in touch with: what is my spiritual health? How do I think about the different elements, the contours, of what might make up my spiritual well-being? The lab allows those unlikely partnerships, but with a continued question of, how do we nurture spiritual life today and tomorrow?
Brandon: Amazing. Great. One of the more recent research products you put out is this amazing report on Illuminating Spiritual Innovation. Could you say a little bit about what you mean by spiritual innovation? What led you, I suppose, to focus on that word, and what do you mean by spiritual innovation? Say a little bit about the work you did, the actual research—where you went, who you talked to—and what you were trying to learn doing that work.
Angie: Well, I would say that the origin of us using that phrase really dates back to this time that we’ve just been describing, where I think Casper and I both came to this body of work with real practitioner hearts and, I would say, with—in a very capacious use of the word ministry—a desire to minister, to serve, in a context that was rapidly changing. And so, this idea of spiritual innovation, I think for us, has always had something to do with: how do you meet the soul needs, the spiritual longings of those who in general, but I think especially in a context where a number of the traditional structures, institutions, and even, in some cases, theologies and rituals are not fit for purpose amongst a growing population? So what do you do about that? It really has felt to us, in some ways, like a design question. I think going back to your question about why we called it Sacred Design Lab, there is a whole host of really rich and challenging design questions at stake right now. And so, I think for us, we were really wanting to build on the scholarship and practitioner wisdom about this concept of innovation, and apply it to the question of spiritual needs and spiritual longings. So when we use it, that’s what we mean by it: we’re looking at new ways to address spiritual longings.
And let me say that, of course, that word innovation can be quite fraught in certain contexts and can have a lot of overtones, depending on where you are socially-located, geographically, religiously. And so, that has been a big part of our work in trying to find language that is effective enough, that’s meaningful enough, to get at this work, and yet also capacious enough to hold it. I think it’s imperfect. And so, as a result, we will often also accompany the phrase spiritual innovation with other words: spiritual imagination, spiritual transformation, spiritual evolution—spiritual adaptation, we were just talking about. So it’s imperfect language. But I think the fact that it is connected to some bodies of work around how you design for meaningful change is helpful, because that is a big part of what we want to support.
Casper: And so, practically, what the research involved was a huge amount of interviews with spiritual innovators and scholars around the world. We were lucky enough to visit a number of countries. We’re in Japan, Brazil. Angie was in India; I was in Egypt. We were in Kenya, the UAE, and, of course, here in the U.S. as well. Our work had really been very U.S.-focused before, so it was a real excitement for us to be able to expand our scholarly gaze and look beyond into very different contexts. In some ways, I would say we were surprised by how much alignment there was with the U.S. context. Certainly, there were very, very different national situations or religious contexts—Islam, in particular. Being in Egypt was really interesting to kind of understand that more, and the UAE.
We worked with a team of post grads, mostly researchers, in seven different regions. We had just more than 100 interviews with practitioners and scholars. It was fascinating. One of my most memorable interviews was in Egypt. I was in Cairo meeting with Amr Khaled, who was, if you’re on the streets of Egypt and you ask anyone who is he, everybody knows. He was the kind of face of like — he was the first kind of televangelist, you might say, in the ‘90s. He’s just had a multi-decade public presence and has always used technology very innovatively. He was the first to be sold in tapes, cassettes, and then DVDs on street corners. Now, he’s in this really interesting place where his theological project is to combine traditional Islamic theology with positive psychology. So he’s integrating a more recent scientific research base, aligning it with traditional Islamic theology to create a formation path. That’s my language, not his. He talks a lot about isan—the idea of perfection, of growing towards perfection—and teaches that through a series of digital programming and fellowships and leadership cohorts with young Muslims around Europe and North Africa. Having him reflect on his own experience of being influenced by his travels in India, of this secular scholarship, and yet embedding it in a Muslim worldview was just a fascinating example of someone innovating within a tradition.
I should say that this idea of spiritual innovation really does sit both outside of traditions—inside and at the edge of it. And so, whenever we were doing this kind of research—whether it was a Buddhist monk in Japan who teaches surfing lessons and then builds in some meditation to sneak that in, whether it’s people creatively building it into a tradition, or something like homecoming, a digital platform that helps people integrate psychedelic experiences that’s based in Canada—that’s totally outside of religious context, but still very, very much engaging a lot of spiritual practices, even if it’s in a sort of medical frame.
Brandon: Angie, is there a story from one of your cases that surprised you, or maybe challenged your assumptions, that you found especially striking?
Angie: Yeah, well, Casper was just speaking about Japan, and I think that was one of the most moving for me. It was when we were outside of Tokyo, we were in a Buddhist temple. Part of the learning for me around the way that a lot of the Buddhist lineages in Japan are passed down is that it’s often within families. You’ll have multiple generations. And so, there’s still a decision point for someone who is engaged in that kind of leadership, but there is also a sense of inheritance and responsibility, right?
And so, this particular spiritual innovator, this monk, Reverend Fujio, was speaking to us about how he has tried to respond to the crisis of isolation in Japan—which is part of why we chose to go to Japan. It’s because that is so acute there, and there’s also a lot of deaths and despair in Japan right now, especially among young people. And so, Reverend Fujio had had a lot of direct impacts of this in his own life. He had lost a few friends to suicide. He just saw the way that, you know, here in the United States where we’re based, some people will look at religious spaces—in some cases, Christian spaces, because that’s our dominant religion in the United States—and say, “Well, I go there just for holidays, for Christmas, or Easter, or for funerals.” That’s the relationship that a lot of people in Japan have to Buddhist temples, is it’s more for ceremonial purposes and can feel, to some people, out of touch with everyday life.
Reverend Fujio just said, “I think that it’s my work to actually go straight into the social problems that I see with the tradition that I have inherited.” And so, he has dedicated himself to ministering to those who are feeling so depleted, that they’re in a mental health crisis. And so, he basically lives his life as a vigil and makes himself available for people to come. If they come, he will just sit with them. Basically, the metaphor he used was, “I helped them recharge their battery.” He’ll start with the physical level and just say, “Are you hot? Are you cold? Do you need water?” Then he’ll walk Zazen with them for as long as they need in order to feel that they can actually access their body again before he’ll even go to any matters of the mind or of the heart or the spirit. He has taken this into the metaverse. He leads Zazen in the metaverse. He started doing this during COVID. So they have a whole sort of virtual version of the temple that anyone can join. He also has started a collective of other spiritual practitioners, mostly Buddhist monks and chaplains, who are dedicated to working together around this issue of how they prevent suicide.
So there’s this kind of intersection of working with technology, working with social problems, and also deeply drawing out the gifts of his tradition in terms of, especially that commitment to practice and the wisdom of what it is like to actually put your body in different positions in order to help access different states. Anyway, I was just very touched by his devotion and the ways that he’s applying creative energy to this particular predicament.
Brandon: Yeah, thank you. Well, a lot of the examples you’ve cited seem to certainly resonate with problems that we’re familiar with in the West here, like loneliness, and then the general secularization, the alienation from ourselves, from our received traditions. Did you find any problems or crises that are rather different, perhaps, from what we experienced in the West?
Casper: Yeah, I think the role of the state was really interesting. Certainly, when we were in Brazil, for example, meeting with practitioners of Mbunda and a host of different African traditions that have mutated and changed in the Brazilian context, many were very actively repressed for a long time. It was interesting. We were in Rio in February, and so we happened to be there on the celebration day of Iemanjá, who is the ocean water divinity or deity. People wear white, go to the beach, offer gifts of thanks. People bring food, flowers. A couple of bottles of champagne were spotted. As ever, in these kinds of ritual spaces you have some people engaging in a beautiful practice of devotion. Others, just to pick up the free food and champagne that is left on the beach. But rather than the state, having played this very repressive role, now this was municipally celebrated and funded because it’s now seen as a draw for tourism. So just the changing way in which state interaction with the traditions, especially in post-colonial contexts—Brazil, was a particular example where it had been embraced. That’s certainly not always the case. But that was something that did feel noticeably different from the U.S. I don’t know, Angie, if there’s others that come to mind for you.
Angie: Yeah, I would say that that theme, writ large—and this is part of the discomfort with the language of innovation, especially—I think we experienced that in the Middle East and in Muslim contexts because of the association of innovation with bid‘ah, and with this idea of new invention inside of Islam, which is essentially seen as heresy. In many cases, that was one important difference of context. In terms of, broadly, in the United States, there is a culture of lionizing innovation and entrepreneurship—a sense of that is the path to getting ahead. It’s to creating something new. While that’s not always true in religious spaces in the United States, I think it is the cultural water that we swim in. So that was definitely not the case, I’d say, in Muslim majority context, then also, I’d say, especially in Africa and Latin America with the specifics of colonialism.
I think also American hegemony was a big factor. I mean, we really experienced the pushback against that language, specifically with the connotation of, “Oh, we’re going to take something and essentially exploit it and use it for profit.” That was the specific association with innovation in an American context and also in a colonial context, right? We’re just going to sort of pilfer what’s here and use it for our own gain as the colonizer culture. And so, the strong push back, I’d say, the sort of counter perspective that we often were met with in these conversations was one in which everything is naturally evolving. You know, if you look at the natural world, that there’s a quality of transformation that is just part of our existence, and we are part of that. And so, the idea that humans would come in and be the inventors, be the innovators, be the ones to come up with something new, is actually just an inaccurate understanding of the world and based on a colonial logic that is countered to and has done violence to a lot of cultures around the world.
So I’d say there was pretty strong resistance in a lot of cases, even while I think there were also a number of experiences of this shared conundrum of people really trying to figure out how to live in today’s world in a way that is meaningful and rich and grounded in something beyond themselves and contending with that struggle. So I think, as Casper said earlier, there were some through lines there. We had a really beautiful dinner with a group of young people in — it was in Dubai, right, Casper?
Casper: Mm-hmm.
Angie: We were sort of finding some of our peers in that context who were sharing, on a personal level, how they’re holding the religion that they grew up with alongside the realities of their life today, right? So that was there in a sort of personal, individual expression. But at the cultural level, we’re dealing with really different contexts.
Brandon: Yeah, that’s great. Dubai happens to be my own spiritual home for various reasons.
Angie: No way.
Brandon: Yeah, I lived there for a number of years, so it’s very dear to me. Obviously, you’re calling all these folks spiritual innovators, whether or not they embrace the term. What are the, I suppose, the factors that are most predictive of their success? What does success look like in terms of spiritual innovation? What factors contribute to whether or not an innovation gains traction?
Casper: Well, now I’m always grateful that there’s two of us because, Angie, we can collectively maybe remember the seven different things that we came up with.
Angie: Well, we could start with the three big buffets of memes that we’ve found.
Casper: Yeah, you do that.
Angie: Yeah, this is very, very straightforwardly, Brandon. In our last decade of working with these folks, we found they have a host of practical needs, of actually being able to create and sustain new things in the world, for projects of any kind. They have a lot of relational needs. We spoke to the feeling of loneliness that often they would experience in their leadership because they’re not quite in any one world in that way. And so, there’s a need for mentorship and also for peers. And then their spiritual needs—how did they go deep with the people in their care? Well, they have to be accessing that space of spiritual nourishment themselves, right? So I’d say those three areas for the innovators themselves, we found that successful innovation, the success of their work is often very connected to the extent to which their needs are being met in those three areas.
And then, as Casper was beginning to allude to, we’ve noticed a host of qualities from what we would describe as effective, or successful, or promising spiritual innovation. I would say they all sort of connect to this idea. I mean, there’s many words for what is the more ideal—what Charles Eisenstein would say, the more beautiful world, speaking of beauty, that our hearts know is possible. If we’re trying to move toward something like that, we could use the language of flourishing or thriving. But successful spiritual innovation is helping us move toward that world—in ourselves, in our communities, in the larger ecosystems that we share and the societies that we’re a part of. So that’s broadly what we were on the lookout for, is what are the conditions that lead to that kind of innovation.
Casper: Yeah, and maybe some of those specifics, just to mention some that we were interested in. Definitely, one was scalability. Without falling prey to the bigger is better. But certainly, we were looking for things that had the opportunity to reach a significant number of people. For example, we would be less interested in an individual practitioner who might offer particular one on one—whether it’s freaky, or healing, or something. Even if that was being combined in an interesting way with a different practice or an unusual context, we were mostly interested in things that could serve multiple people, and hopefully at some significant scale.
Project sustainability is something. Having looked at this kind of question for 12 years, there have been so many awesome projects that have come and gone. A lot of individual created — that’s normal in an innovation stage. But so many wonderful projects really depended on a single individual often—who put in the labor, the creativity, and was able to make it work, but then had a baby, or moved away, or had a health crisis, or got a job that could pay for their health insurance, or whatever it was. We’re definitely really interested in: what are the models, the financial models, that make these kinds of projects work? There are a host of different ones, from member-sustained projects to some of them are like venture-backed, for example. So if you look at some of the big apps that most of us will be familiar with—like Insight Timer, or Headspace, or Hallo—time will tell how long they survive once the venture money runs out. To projects that are entirely volunteer-run, like ServiceSpace, for example, which has a huge reach, or other models that are experimenting with things like cooperatives or social enterprise model, where something is revenue-generating that cross-subsidizes something that’s then offered for free. So we’ve been very curious to try and understand how those different models work. That’s a continuing conundrum, I would say, I would say—if not always the first question, then certainly one of the most significant questions we had over and over again that spiritual innovators struggle with.
Brandon: I would imagine some of these would certainly be universal, in terms of the funding model, for instance, and our leadership transitions, or what sort of contributes to their ability to endure over time and across generations and manage their various expectations of followers, if you want to call them members or whatever they might be called, right? The other thing I was curious about was whether you see any downsides, or pitfalls, or unintended consequences of spiritual innovation.
Casper: Oh, sure. Yeah, I mean, there are so many. The obvious ones are often about failed leadership. Our first case study that we often ended up talking about in the early years of our research was fitness communities and CrossFit especially. And so, a classic example there of people being responsible for soul care in a way that they were not trained for—someone who’s excellent at helping you with your form as you lift a barbell, but maybe not very skilled in navigating your mother’s cancer diagnosis. And so, the most egregious examples of that would have been inappropriate romantic relationships between someone who’s in a leadership role and someone who’s a participant. But there are so many. All the things that go wrong in a congregation also go wrong in these projects—financial mismanagement, burnout, team, conflict. You name it. It happens.
I think some of the more philosophically interesting examples are often about the ethics of translating a tradition. So, as people are innovating, that taking a practice from one place and putting it in a new context. Or, as I did with the Harry Potter podcast, we were drawing on the Lectio Divina tradition, which, of course, itself was a spiritual innovation. Guigo II, a Carthusian monk of the 14th century, was adapting a different formula for engaging with a biblical text. He put it into these four steps, which we now think of as the golden approach to Lectio Divina. But it came from somewhere too. We often quote Rabbi Oren Kohlberg, who says, “Every tradition was once an innovation.” So that question of ethic is really paramount. And so, what are the reflection questions you need? What are the relationships you need? What are the kind of support and accountability structures of mentorship that are really important? That’s a lot of what we spend our time doing in terms of supporting spiritual innovators now. It’s trying to help them build that bench of support structures, of relationships. Because we know that when they hit inevitable challenges, it’s the network of support and accountability that helps people through, or where they get lost, where something comes undone. And so, I would say that kind of question of leadership and ethics and translating tradition are two of the things that stand out for me.
Angie: Yeah, our colleague, Sue Phillips, has this beautiful phrase about the spiritual infrastructure of the future. She wrote a great article on it. I think that’s part of the predicament,. It’s that there is, if you think about, of course, the structure, the organizational structures are different across religious traditions. But usually, they do include some amount of training and formation for leadership, right? They include also some amount of support for people once they’re in positions of leadership. That’s not to mention all of the other kinds of infrastructure that exist around if you think about just religious life, all of the elements that go into that, right?
So if someone is in a position where they’re spiritually innovating, what we have found is that there are pretty massive infrastructure gaps. And so, all those questions Casper was just naming—whether it’s about ethics and leadership, whether it’s about how you sustain your work financially, or even how you make a decision about the way that you want to approach this question of money and livelihood as it relates to being called to a work that has a deep spiritual core, that kind of interrogation—and then the practices and the relationships that will sustain an ongoing journey of this kind of work, we’re just in a very broadly transitional time when it comes to all of that. That transition is accompanied by, of course, these additional macro forces, like the rise in all of these technologies and things like that, that we’re also having to contend with in real time. So I think there are a lot of perils to spiritual innovation in that kind of landscape, and there are real risks. As far as people just—you hope most of the time they’re well-meaning—but kind of putting themselves out there and meeting people who have real needs, whether or not someone else sitting over here would say that they’re qualified or authorized to do that, or should be doing it, right? Sometimes that can indeed lead to real harm being done. So I guess that’s a big part of our hope and our project at Sacred Design Lab. It’s to do our best or to make a contribution that will support this work being done with integrity and consideration, and also to help with the advancement of some of those elements of spiritual infrastructure, so that people are less alone in doing the work and not so much casting about as if they’re doing it for the first time. Because, actually, there are centuries of wisdom about how to do this work well.
Brandon: Right, yeah. I mentioned that’s part of the challenge there. Some of these innovators, at least, are responding to a perceived frustration with the existing traditions they’re coming out of, and maybe even just a desire for autonomy from those traditions—and wanting, perhaps, the desire to chart out new territory and venture out on one’s own and try to find an authentic way of engaging with some of these perennial questions, perhaps in ways that no one has done before but are meeting our current needs right now might make them resistant to looking to established traditions for any help, right?
Casper: What I would say, though, Brandon, is that the resistance often is about institutions rather than individuals. And so, one of the lab projects that we ran a few years ago was to pair up spiritual innovators with elders, mostly ordained leaders across different traditions, for a sort of six-month relationship building incubation experiment.
Brandon: Oh, lovely.
Casper: The minimum requirement was that they met for an hour each month on Zoom just to talk. We framed this in for the elders so that they were engaging the conversations appropriately, and we gave them some questions to offer. Overwhelmingly, that was a really positive experience for both ends of the conversation. We would have an older Rabbi talk with a young former Muslim, but now secular yoga innovator. Or we had an older Presbyterian minister with — gosh, I’m trying to remember who it was in particular. But anyway, these very unexpected conversations. Nearly, always there was such appreciation for the wisdom that came through both ways. It was energizing and exciting for the older person, and grounding and helpful to be reminded that the questions and the challenges that they were experiencing as an innovator is one that these older folks have had to navigate to—whether it was in a congregational context or something else.
What I’m trying to illustrate with this point is that that resistance is less significant than you might expect if there is curiosity and generosity in an approach in the context of a relationship. I think you’re right that there’s real misgivings about the power structures and everything else within institutions that, interpersonally, it was actually much more open.
Brandon: Wow.
Angie: Well, and that speaks to the — you’re asking about the burden of innovation, Brandon. I think a burden that many of these spiritual innovators carry is the feeling that, if they want something to exist, they have to create it. And that if they are creating it, they’re doing so for the first time. I mean, I know that it’s factually untrue, but it can feel that way and in part because of how cut off many of these folks are from others who have done things like this. And to your point about doing it, especially outside of religious institutions, if they haven’t been connected to those kinds of institutions, they just genuinely don’t necessarily know that someone in that position would have wisdom that’s relevant for what they’re doing. And so, that was part of the pilot that Casper just references. We wanted to just create conditions for them to actually meet each other and have that type of conversation to relieve some of the burden.
Brandon: That sort of mentorship is critical—just to know that someone else has done something similar or that there is wisdom somewhere, right? That this really is—you don’t really have to reinvent the wheel. But I think also, what I appreciate about your work, too, is that it dispels the misconception that it’s pretty pervasive: that spirituality is somehow immune to the problems that are associated with traditional religion, right? It’s this pure, positive, uniformly beneficial thing.
Casper: For sure. I would say, because of that—whether scholars agree with this or not—the way people perceive the difference between religion and spirituality, on the street, is that religion is institutional and spirituality is personal. But what happens within that realm once it’s taken out of that institutional context is that spirituality in the market become very, very quickly intertwined. And so, I think one of the biggest challenges on that ethics question that we were talking about before is: what about money? What can you charge for? What shouldn’t be charged for? How do you make a living, but at the same time, how do you respect a tradition? Especially as some of these themes around spirituality—especially ritual—become more and more popular as a brand tool. I mean, literally, the makeup brand Rituals, right?
Brandon: Right.
Casper: So you see this language being co-opted by the capitalist market. Now, at the same time, does religion itself have a challenging history with capitalism? Absolutely. So I think you’re so right to point to, even though on the face of it, we might think these are very different contexts and different challenges. It’s a lot of the same stuff.
Brandon: Yeah, I’m curious to know what you’re seeing in the work you’re doing in relation to Gen Z? I mean, the problems that you identified in your report on How We Gather were focused maybe on the millennial context. But are you seeing there’s this talks about a religious resurgence, or revival, or whatever you want to call it, among Gen Z, to turning towards maybe more traditional forms of religion? I don’t know to what extent that’s borne out in data, but are you seeing that or any particular patterns among the youngest generation right now?
Casper: Angie, I can start, and I’ll let you build in more.
Angie: Sure, yeah.
Casper: So I would say, yes, you’re so right: that our kind of intro framing was definitely around millennials. And so, we haven’t focused specifically on Gen Zs over the last couple of years. I want to caveat everything that I’m going to say next. I think you’re right to point to the difference between the narrative and the data. I think Ryan Burge’s work has been very illustrative of not seeing the evidence yet in the hard numbers. However, I think here is the key thing that I find most interesting, which is that: as younger generations have less of a personal experience of religious life, religious institutions, they don’t have the same reaction or reactivity to institutional religion that maybe people who had a particular wounding experience did. So as people are born outside of religious tradition, rather than kind of like, “Oh, religion is bad,” it’s more just like religion is irrelevant. Then if there’s something that’s interesting about it—whether that’s like religious iconography being used on the runway, in a fashion context, or the way in which becoming really devout is somehow counter cultural now—there’s a different context, is what I’m trying to point to for Gen Zs, in which engaging religion doesn’t mean what it did for a Gen X. Certainly not for a boomer context, or even a millennial one. So I’m not saying that there’s a religious revival, per se. But what I do think is true is that younger people are very conscious that the way things are is not how they should be. They’re curious to understand. Whether it’s a relationship with technology, for example—if you have an answer, I want it. And if you’re religious or if you’re secular, I’m actually pretty open to you as a source of guidance, in a way that wouldn’t have been the case 20, 30, years ago.
Angie: Yeah, just building on that, I think I have sort of — after Casper and I moved out of Harvard Divinity School, I have stayed connected to the university, both at Harvard and now a little bit more at Columbia. I have noticed that amongst at least the students that I’ve been working with, there is a sense, to Casper’s point of, certainly, just an assumption that things are not as they should be. Then additionally, I think, a sense that the educational institution is being one place that they are still finding themselves, with spending a lot of time. But that those institutions also don’t seem to be set up to address some of these questions either. And so, the questions about meaning and purpose and belonging, I think that I’ve experienced a relative openness to trying to locate sources of wisdom about those topics. I think we see that borne out in some of the courses that are especially popular at universities across the country.
At Harvard, there’s one on Confucius and the good life, which is always massively oversubscribed. There’s the one on happiness at Yale. There’s this sort of positive. You know what I mean? It’s actually about, well, who am I, and what does it mean to have a good life? Why am I spending my time there? This just sort of fundamental and existential questions. If one is coming of age not having had those questions spoken to—either in a religious setting or an educational setting—then as you approach your 20s, there’s just this significant vacuum, right? I think that is a perilous situation. And of course, we’re seeing a lot of people, of course, turning to the people who are online to tell them about those things, and for better and for worse, definitely. Right? But those questions have not gone away. And so, I would say, whether it’s playing out in a religious revival or it’s playing out in terms of people finding gurus on the internet, they’re going to look. People are going to look. The question is: what’s going to be there to meet them?
Brandon: Yeah, thank you. You’re also currently catalyzing a hub for spiritual innovation or for spiritual innovators. Could you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing, what you’re designing to solve there, what success is going to look like for you, what you’re aspiring to there?
Casper: Yeah, so after this research phase of getting to interview all these spiritual innovators around the world, we heard again and again, as Angie said, the need for relational support, practical support, and spiritual support. And so, one thing we thought we could do is to create just the biggest library of resources for spiritual innovation that we could think of. So we’ve collected over 350 podcast episodes, books, articles, frameworks, organizations, anything that might be of value. We’ve organized them in a sort of choose-your-own-adventure structure. So listeners can go to spiritualinnovation.org and pick a theme like “fund your project,” or questions around leadership, or epics—those challenges that we mentioned before—and find a curated pathway with videos of real-life stories from practitioners, some guidance with examples to point to, and then all of these resources to help hopefully meet some of the practical needs that innovators have.
Then secondly, we’ve got a directory in which spiritual innovators around the world can create a profile, share a little bit about what they’re interested in, what they know about, what they can help others with, and hopefully facilitate some of the relational needs that we know folks have. In addition, we host regular Zoom events that people can come to, which involves some teaching of a practical tool or a framework, and then lots of breakout groups. So it helps people get to know each other.
Brandon: Amazing.
Casper: And so, yeah, we’ll be launching that on October 15th of this year, 2025. We’ll be keeping that going for the years to come. So please do check it out if you’re interested.
Brandon: Fantastic. Well, Casper’s energy has been phenomenal, learning more about the work you’re doing. If you’d like to guide our listeners to perhaps contribute—whether it’s researchers, philanthropists, practitioners—what might be the most helpful thing they might do? If there’s something that you could direct them to, we’ll certainly put the links to your to your websites. But if there’s any practical steps that you might encourage people to take in terms of growing the spiritual innovation ecosystem, what might you recommend?
Casper: I’ll add one, which is — well, maybe I’ll add two, if I may. One is definitely to check out spiritualinnovation.org, of course. Join some of the events that we host, if you’re interested in just learning or understanding more. But honestly, I think the most beautiful stories to me always happen when people connect locally with an unexpected ally. So if you find yourself as a leader in a congregation or someone who’s really steeped in a tradition, go out and actively reach out to the person who runs the yoga studio, or the fitness community, or the arts group, or the local volunteering organization that seems to be speaking to people’s spiritual lives in some way, and say, “Hey, I love what you’re doing.” We kind of talk about that idea of accompaniment—of coming alongside—and I think that’s really the posture. This is language we learned from our friends at Wesleyan Impact Partners, steeped in the Methodist tradition, but to really, without sacrificing who you are and what’s important to you, come alongside someone who’s doing something new and learn from them and then, through that relationship, give what you know too. Because it’s in those friendships and those collaborations often that the most exciting new things emerge. So build relationships, is what I would say. How about you, Angie?
Angie: Absolutely. Well, one other thing is, just having referenced that platform and the resources on it, there is an invitation on the platform to add more resources. And, Brandon, knowing that your listeners are there at the intersection of scholarship and practice, that is one specific intersection that we’re really looking to help build out, is what is the scholarly work being done about all of these changes and about spiritual innovation itself? Casper and I have had a touchstone ever since we started working together that we’re out here trying to tell stories of courage and hope. We really always been looking for, where are the instances where things are coming together in a way that these spiritual longings are being met, right? So we really want to understand more about where and why that is happening, and we want to catalyze more of it, right?
So for the scholars listening, we’re really curious about what work should we be looking at, should spiritual innovators be paying attention to? It could come from any number of domains. Then for the practitioners, what are the things that you draw upon in your own work? And please share those with others, because we want to help strengthen this whole ecosystem. So that’s just a very practical invitation, but it’s also one that we’re going to be definitely giving our time to in the next couple of years.
Brandon: Fantastic. Well, it’s been really a pleasure. Thank you again for joining us and sharing your insights. Congrats on the wonderful work you’re doing.
Angie: Likewise.
Casper: Thanks so much. You too, Brandon. Grateful to be here with you.