McPherson is currently wrapping up a three-year Templeton-funded grant project on “Spiritual Yearning and the Problem of Spiritual Alienation,” which will result in his third book monograph titled Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God (under contract with Oxford University Press) as well as an edited volume titled Spiritual Yearning in an Age of Secularization: Sociological, Psychological, and Philosophical Perspectives (intended for OUP). Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God articulates, explores, and responds to the problem of spiritual alienation, which is the state of being separated from the place of our spiritual fulfillment. This book contends that spiritual alienation is a perennial feature of the human condition but is also exacerbated within the conditions of modernity. It seeks to show how spiritual alienation is integrally connected with our spiritual yearnings in giving rise to them, and also how it can best be addressed. McPherson’s next project will be co-editing (with Fiona Ellis) The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy of Religion (under contract with Cambridge University Press), to which he will also be contributing a chapter titled “The Spiritual Predicament.”
