The New Yorker:

Dozens of religious leaders experienced magic mushrooms in a university study. Many are now evangelists for psychedelics.

By Michael Pollan

In October, 2015, Hunt Priest, then a minister at Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Mercer Island, in Washington State, was flipping through The Christian Century, a progressive Protestant magazine, when an advertisement caught his eye: “Seeking Clergy to Take Part in a Research Study of Psilocybin and Sacred Experience.” Psilocybin is a hallucinogenic compound found in certain mushrooms; researchers at Johns Hopkins University and N.Y.U. wanted to administer it to religious leaders who had “an interest in further exploring and developing their spiritual lives.”

Priest, a slight, bearded, and disarmingly open man from small-town Kentucky, grew up in a Protestant churchgoing family and felt a religious calling as a teen-ager. He went to work for Delta Air Lines, but he told me that, in his thirties, “I began to feel something was missing in my spiritual life.” He started reading Buddhist texts, including Thích Nhất Hạnh’s “Living Buddha, Living Christ,” which eventually steered him back toward Christianity. At thirty-seven, he entered seminary.

Go to link