○According to the paper, Michael Ferguson’s life seems to be full of contradictions.
Mr. Ferguson held simultaneous appointments at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School. Through his Neurospirituality Lab, which he founded, he leads pioneering research at the intersection of theism and neuroscience. Mr. Ferguson was also raised as a Mormon, but he is also a Catholic. He survived gay conversion therapy in his 20s, and with his girlfriend’s husband became Utah’s first gay marriage license.
Sitting in St. Paul’s Parish on Mount Auburn Street, Mr. Ferguson explains how the seemingly disparate aspects of his story – faith and science, religion and sexuality – are tied together.
He says his interest in neuroscience was first developed as a child in the Mormon church.
“Ever since I can remember, I’ve been very interested in the spiritual world,” Ferguson says. “That fascination with the spirit world and the human mind continued throughout my adolescence and throughout my undergraduate education. If you’re interested in visualizing the human mind, brain imaging is a very good way to go. .”
Eventually, this interest developed into a Ph.D. Professor Ferguson conducted fMRI brain scans at the University of Utah to identify brain regions involved in the Mormon phenomenon of “feeling the Holy Spirit,” a feeling of connection with God during worship.
His graduate work led him to establish the Neurospirituality Laboratory at Harvard University, with a postdoctoral fellowship focused on theoretical neuroscience and intelligence.
On his website, Ferguson describes neurospirituality as “an emerging discipline that combines neuroscience and spirituality research to understand the human experience in new ways.” His current research focuses on locating and comparing mystical and dogmatic experiences of spirituality in the brain.
As we speak, Ferguson’s scientific explanation of spirituality stands in sharp contrast to the wooden crosses that hang in the rooms of St. Paul’s Parish. This argument feels out of place because traditional images of Jesus Christ appear in all directions.
But for Ferguson, contemplating spirituality both in the chapel and the laboratory enriches the experience of religion. Uncovering the neuroscience of spirituality is just another way to explain existing theological narratives. “At some point, we got used to there being more than one way to explain the same phenomenon,” he says.
Mr. Ferguson attributes this comfort in plurality, in part, to his experience as a gay Mormon. “Being gay created a space between subjective and objective ways of explaining things,” he says. “I’m thinking about these two different stories of her in conversation with each other.”
Learning to reconcile his inner identity with the church’s narrative about homosexuality was a difficult process. When Ferguson was 22, anxious to live up to Mormon expectations that he should marry a woman, he attempted to change his sexuality through gay conversion therapy.
Instead, the experience ultimately gave him the strength to accept being gay. “Going through conversion therapy was a soul fire in the sense that I was able to really trust my own experience, that this was my soul’s reality,” Ferguson says.
In January 2012, Ferguson met her future husband, Seth Anderson. At the time, same-sex marriage was illegal in Utah, but that ban was unexpectedly overturned in December 2013. When they heard the news, they rushed to the county clerk’s office, unsure whether it would be minutes or days before they received their marriage certificates. License before the law is amended again.
Ferguson has probably told this story hundreds of times, but tears still stream down his face when he recounts that moment to me. “It was so impossible that everything came together for that to happen. It’s still something that just blows my mind when I think about it,” he says.
Seventeen days later, the state appealed and the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses was halted. Nine months later, Utah was formally ordered to recognize same-sex marriage after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.
In 2012, Mr. Ferguson and several others filed a consumer fraud lawsuit against JONAH, the company that provided them with conversion therapy “treatment.” Three years later, Jonah was found guilty. Ferguson v. Jonah is an important case in the gay rights movement, as it was the first time that an American court declared homosexuality to be not a mental illness or disorder.
Last December, Ferguson and Anderson celebrated their 10th anniversary.
Now a Catholic, Ms. Ferguson leads the choir in the local Mormon congregation where her husband practices. “Neither tradition is traditionally known for celebrating homosexuality,” he says with a laugh.
The tension between his identity and his faith tradition does not trouble Ferguson. Like a real scientist, he uses the analogy of principal component analysis, a mathematical method for comparing data sets, to explain his own experience with Christianity.
“If you have a complex system, and there’s a lot going on in it, a lot of signals, a lot of noise, you can break it down and ask, ‘What are the important principles?’ Masu. “What are the key components of this system?” he says.
For Ferguson, the key elements of Christianity are loving God, loving humans, and loving nature. When he applies this analysis to his own set of internal values, he obtains the same three principal components.
Ferguson chose to pay attention to these three areas where his core values align with the values of his religion, rather than where the values of his religion may not align. “If there is a tension between the 10th and 12th and 50th and 100th components of the system of tradition and the system of my soul, they are , far down the priority setlist.”The big three elements of both systems are tradition and my soul,” he says.
I asked if his experience had ever made him question his faith in God.
“The nature of God is fundamentally changing for me,” he replies. “On the one hand, you have impersonal mystical powers, but on the other, you have a being who is acutely aware, intelligent, and interested in the daily events of each person’s life. A truly vast terrain. That’s why I’ve never felt the need to get out of that one word, ‘God’, because it covers so much conceptual ground.”
Ferguson engages rigorously in this “conceptual realm” by exploring and sharing new perspectives on spirituality. He currently teaches an online course on mindful self-compassion. He also leads monthly trips for students to visit the Religious Sisters of Carmelite Sisters in Roxbury, a group dedicated to contemplative service. He finds their dedication to contemplative service not only inspiring, but also “an important element in the human ecology.”
This appreciation for different cultural traditions of worship is reflected in his position as director of wellness and self-discovery for the first-year residential program. He said this position offers a “creative challenge” to appropriately incorporate both secular and religious spirituality into residential wellness.
As part of this effort, Mr. Ferguson recently led an Earth Compassion Retreat at Harvard Forest for students during spring break. During the retreat, students participated in sacred Native American traditions with local tribal pipe bearers, experienced sound meditation with opera singers, and practiced Qi Gong with master teachers. Other scholars at the retreat also represented Muslim, Jewish, and Christian perspectives.
“It went so well that I was blissfully happy for a week afterward,” Ferguson told me.
If there is one clear consistency in his experience, it is his desire to explore spirituality from as many perspectives as possible.
“Once you get used to the idea of epistemic pluralism, it’s okay to have multiple qualitative stories about common experiences and common events,” Ferguson says.
