Kenneth Rose

Kenneth Rose, Ph.D., is an emeritus professor of philosophy and religion. I taught at the university-level for thirty years and my degrees include an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School and an M.A. and Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard University. At Harvard, I was a Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, where I also was a resident for seven years.

Besides numerous academic articles and reviews, I have authored four academic books: Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics: Contemplative Philosophies and Being. (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming December 2024), Yoga, Meditation, and Mysticism: Contemplative Universals and Meditative Landmarks (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Pluralism: The Future of Religion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), and Knowing the Real: John Hick on the Cognitivity of Religions and Religious Pluralism (Peter Lang, 1996). I also authored a spiritual memoir, The Light of the Self: A Memoir of a Spiritual Awakening (2019), three volumes of poetry, Ray of Blue: Poems from the Higher Seeing (2023), The Speaking Fountain: Poetry as Written Māyā, (2020), The Edge of Awakening: Poems from the Borderline of Mind and Awareness (2019), and a book on contemplative and meditative practice, Fragments of Contemplation: Catching Spiritual News on the Run (2019). These books and my Audible audiobooks are available on Amazon.

I developed and guided the free online course “Wisdom from World Religions,” which was funded by a Templeton World Charity Foundation grant. During the period of the grant (2017-2019), I was a Senior Research Fellow at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.

My major research interests are comparative religion, pluralist philosophies and theologies of religions, comparative mysticism, and contemplative methods.

In my own yoga and meditation practice, I combine methods and insights from Advaita Vedānta, the Upaniṣads, the Yoga Sūtra, and various schools of Buddhism.