I was born in Lund, a small university town in Southern Sweden, but spent my childhood on Gotland, a large island in the middle of the Baltic Sea, known for its many medieval churches and the still intact city walls of the main city, Visby.
When I was 13 years old, we moved once again, now to a farm in the western part of Sweden. After three years, I enrolled in the program of humanities at Bäckäng Gymnasiet (high school) in Borås with a focus on languages: Swedish, English, German, French, and Latin.
In 1988, my academic career began with a year of Religious Studies at the University of Gothenburg, but in 1989 I was also admitted to the program of Fine Art (painting) at Valand Academy in Gothenburg. I decided to pursue my intellectual and art interest at the same time and graduated in 1995, with a bachelor degree in History of Religions (minor subjects Philosophy and Art history) and with a diploma in Fine Art (five years of study). The same year, I began studies in Sanskrit and enrolled in the Ph. D. program in History of Religions with a focus on Asian religions. In 2002, I defended my Ph. D. thesis named On the Efficacy of Sacrifice, which investigates views on sacrifice in the brāhmaņas, Vedic texts from the first millennium B. C.
Between 2003 and 2006, I took up a temporary position at the University of Bergen, Norway, as an assistant professor in the History of Religions, after which I returned to the University of Gothenburg to take up a position in Religious Studies with a focus on Asian religions.
During the fall semester of 2013, I lectured at Haverford College on a scholarship offered by STINT (the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education) called ‘Excellence in Teaching’ (now renamed Teaching Sabbatical).
In 2020, I returned to Norway to teach mainly religious education, first at Nord University in Bodø and then from 2022 at NLA University College in Bergen.
My major publications, besides the Ph. D. thesis, are a book on the interiorization of rituals (2013), a biography of the Canadian artist and novelist Michael O’Brien (2017), and the cooperation project, The Future of Religious Studies in India (2021).
Sometimes, due to the intensity of academic work, it has been difficult to pursue my art interest, but during the last couple of years, I have, besides painting, worked with video production first in Sweden and then in Norway, mainly as part of starting up EWTN Sweden and Norway.
In May 2025, I started my own company, Exsultet Studio, together with my son Rafael. It is dedicated to using new AI technology for Christian film and media production. A great transformation in cultural production is unfolding presently, and we’re excited to see how this technology can be used for good.