CBD 2026: Personal Ecologies: Contemplation, Reading, and the More-than-Human World with Ariel Evan Mayse

Our session will grapple with two fundamental questions at the heart of Jewish thought and theology. First, what does it mean to read as a spiritual practice, and how do we do so with others as part of a relational community? And second, how can reading more deeply and expansively help us to become more sensitive and open to the world around us, and to the richness of our own inner worlds? We will think deeply about the place of learning and reading, both personal and professional, as key to our continuous processes of moral, religious, and intellectual self-formation.

Ariel Evan Mayse joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, after previously serving as the Director of Jewish Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and a research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Michigan. Mayse holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University and rabbinic ordination from Beit Midrash Har’el in Israel. Mayse's research and teaching interests include: Hasidism, Kabbalah, and Jewish mysticism; comparative religious ethics and theology; ecology and the environmental humanities; medieval Jewish thought; and the philosophy of Jewish law. He is the author of Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020; Hebrew translation, 2022); Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2024; Hebrew translation, in progress); and Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community, and LIfe in the Modern World, with Sam Berrin Shonkoff (Brandeis University Press, 2020). His next project, As a Deep River Rises: Judaism, Ecology and Environmental Ethics, is under contract with Brandeis University Press, and he is currently working on a biography of the Baal Shem Tov for the Jewish Lives Series (Yale University Press).

This session is part of the FREE Contemplation by Design Summit, Oct. 14-25, 2026.

The full summit schedule for this year will be posted at: https://med.stanford.edu/contemplation/summit.html.