John Matthew Allison is an interspiritual practitioner and PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice University. His research focuses on philosophical anthropology, Black Studies, comparative mystical literature, and religious pluralism as both an epistemological and political problem. His dissertation, “The Ultimate Enigma: Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human,” offers the first systematic reconstruction of Wynter’s theory of language as an evolutionaryamplifier of human potential. His work has appeared in Labyrinth, Religious Theory, Journal of Comparative Theology, and Reading Religion. He received his BA from Westminster College, MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and MA from Rice University. Outside of the academy, John is an interspiritual practitioner who was raised as a Christian (first Eastern Orthodox, then Presbyterian), and has spent his adult life as a “seeker” whose contemplative praxis has been informed by various Buddhist, Islamic, and Esoteric traditions.