Psychedelics are reshaping religious life in America, from churches to hospital rooms.
Jeffrey Breau studies psychedelic spirituality in clinics and congregations. He is a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality and an affiliated researcher with PULSE at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center.
His ethnographic research focuses on psychedelic churches in the United States. Since 2023, he has conducted over 120 interviews and spent 500+ hours within psychedelic religious communities. He is writing a book about these communities and what they reveal about religion in modern America.
He also works on psychedelic chaplaincy. He co-led Harvard Divinity School’s psychedelic chaplaincy training program and helped develop the ketamine integration chaplaincy program at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, one of the first hospital-based spiritual care programs for patients receiving ketamine.
From 2024 to 2026, he was program lead of Harvard’s Psychedelics, Religion, and Spirituality initiative, where he co-founded the annual Psychedelic Intersections conference and organized two dozen public events. His research has been featured in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and the Harvard Gazette, and published in Anthropology of Consciousness, PLOS One, and Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.
Jeffrey holds an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School. Previously, he managed the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram in Taos, directed wellness programming at Harvard College, and led global vendor operations at Google. He lives in Cambridge, MA, with his wife and their many houseplants.
Photo Credit: Jeffrey Blackwell