Academic

I am a professor and a scholar-scientist bridging the humanities, human sciences, and computational sciences. My PhD is in philosophy of religion and I teach philosophy, theology, religion, and ethics in Boston University’s School of Theology. I am also a data scientist and I teach AI and data-science ethics in Boston University’s Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences.

Outside Boston University, I co-founded and am executive director of the Center for Mind and Culture, a nonprofit research institute dedicated to tackling complex social problems using hi-tech methods. I also founded Wildheart Evolution, a nonprofit aiming to support the spiritual journeys of nonreligious and unconventionally religious people through book publishing, cultivating new voices, and creating a conversation space for thought leaders and practitioners.

Both within Boston University and through the Center for Mind and Culture, I participate in numerous research projects related to the study of religions using the sciences of cognition and culture and the computational sciences.

Outreach

My personal goals include trying to use my over-trained brain to make a difference in the world. This begins with the research we do at the Center for Mind and Culture, where we take on issues such as religious extremist violence, child sex trafficking, and immigrant integration challenges. I also endeavor to communicate with diverse audiences about religion and spirituality in all of its aspects. “Religion” points to a complicated, wonderful, dangerous set of human phenomena, and we need to understand it to exercise responsible control over it. I use my web sites and publications to reach out to non-academic audiences about religion and spirituality, as well as contemporary social problems.

For example, one of my outreach programs involves explaining to the general public what scientists and other intellectuals have to say about religion and spirituality. Resources of this kind are collected at ScienceOnReligion.org, ExploringMyReligion.org, and the ScienceOnReligion blog at Patheos.com.

Another of my outreach efforts involves writing fiction. I do it to tell stories but the themes I write about are often connected to domains in which I conduct research.

Personal

I live with my partner in the Boston area, having raised our children in Boston after emigrating from Australia. I am fond of cricket, Vegemite, and Australian Rules Football.

Contact

You can contact me at wwildman-at-bu.edu (replace the “-at-” with @).

This Site

The photographs on this site are meaningful to me. I believe each of them is in the public domain. If anyone knows otherwise, please contact me and I will remove the picture immediately.

Intellectual Autobiography

For its 2021 meeting, the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought asked me to present my intellectual autobiography, which I was honored to do. It was strange to be forced to slow down and think about my intellectual history. And it was daunting to be listened to by colleagues on such a topic.

I might have spent more time on ideas but I didn’t for two reasons. On the one hand, later in 2021, a book of essays about my ideas appeared, and my response essay in that volume covers that territory. On the other hand, the intellectual autobiography was a pandemic-affected Zoom affair, scheduled after a long day of lectures, so I wanted to keep it light. I focused on life stories.

Since there is no way to publish such a thing, I’m posting it here as an illustrated pdf.

20210605-Intellectual-Autobiography-for-IARPT