Psychedelics are changing religious life in America, from clinics to congregations.
Jeffrey Breau is a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality who studies psychedelics and religion. His ethnographic research focuses on novel psychedelic churches. Since 2023, he has conducted more than 100 interviews and spent more than 500 hours within these communities. He is writing a book on what these churches reveal about spirituality 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 oversaw the chaplaincy program. His research has been featured in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and the Harvard Gazette. His scholarship appears 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, Massachusetts, with his wife and their many houseplants.