Team

Bryan McCarthy (M.Div., S.T.M., Yale; D.Phil., Oxford) is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg, where he also obtained his bachelor’s degree. He teaches Post-Kantian Philosophy, Eastern Thought, Philosophy of Religion, and Business Ethics. In his scholarship, he focuses on how material things augment or hinder authentic religiosity and spirituality. Currently, this has two prongs: religious phenomenology of clothing and the religiosity of psychedelic medicine. For the first prong, he is working on a monograph about the extent to which our clothing shapes our self-experience and how this impacts religious and spiritual pursuits. The second prong chiefly involves investigating how psychedelic drugs might facilitate Christian faith and practice. In addition to co-leading the present study, he has authored peer-reviewed articles in Christian Bioethics and Journal of Psychedelic Studies and was the senior author on a comment to the recent study with psilocybin and clergy in Psychedelic Medicine. He got into this work because his knowledge of the field as well as some early experiences indicated that this area of medicine has much relevance for religious faith. He is a practicing Catholic.

Russ Phillips (Ph.D., Bowling Green State) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg. It was his lifelong dream to move back to his hometown and find academic work, which he did in 2012 after spending three decades in Maine, Missouri, and Ohio. Russ enjoys teaching a multitude of undergraduate courses—from cross cultural psychology to individual therapy—and involving students in his research. Over the past quarter-century, Dr. Phillips has studied and published 25+ peer-reviewed papers concerning the psychological causes and consequences of relating to the sacred, including how spirituality is involved in coping with stress, psychospiritual interventions, and fundamentalism. The opportunity to study Christian and other spiritual elements within psychedelic states has allowed him to return to what originally drew him to the field—magical, mystical, powerful transcendent experiences. Russ uses both qualitative-phenomenological and quantitative methods in his research. Besides psychology, he enjoys the outdoors—kayaking, biking, hunting, hiking, and hopefully, one day, surfing. He also loves to travel and experience different cultures, having been to Costa Rica, Thailand, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, France, Germany, and The Netherlands, amongst other places. His goal is to visit all 50 states and all 7 continents and to spend retirement traveling. Card games, fantasy, sci-fi, and horror are Russ’ guilty pleasures, along with the occasional Scotch or Cabernet Sauvignon.