Christian Religious Experience Research Articles

The Anthropocene Age Reveals the Insanity at the Heart of Western Christian Religious Experience

The Anthropocene Age Reveals the Insanity at the Heart of Western Christian Religious Experience

Культурологические проекции христианского религиозно-мистического опыта

The paper aims to analyze the heuristic potential of the Christian religious and mystical experience comprehension through the subject of culturology. The authors focus on the culturological approach to this experience which is conceptualized as a cultural tradition. Particular attention is paid to the Christian mysticism as spiritual and at the same time cultural heritage. The scientific originality of the research consists in the complex analysis of the place of culturological knowledge and cognition in the interdisciplinary space of the Christian religious and mystical experience comprehension. Particular importance is given to the interdisciplinary interaction between culturology and philosophy of culture in relation to defining the role of mystical experience in Christian culture. As a result, it has been proved that culturological projections of the Christian religious and mystical experience as a subject of culturology form a multifaceted system presented not only by the variety of artifacts, but also by the unique manifestation of transcendent basis of human culture.

COVID-19. A Catechetical-Experiential Reading

This article seeks to give a Christian understanding to the reality of COVID-19 which the world has gone through in the past months. This is done in a catechetical way by elaborating upon what truly transforms a lived event into an experience and into a Christian religious experience through a catechetical process. This implies seeking to understand any lived event by reflecting upon it and then applying the results of one’s reflection to one’s life. This theoretical framework is then applied to the reality of COVID-19 with the aim of rendering the lived event of the pandemic into a Christian religious experience which leaves a positive effect on the lives of believers through a catechetical process of understanding it in the light of the Word of God, and then applying the outcomes to one’s life afterwards.

Connectivity and communion: The mobile phone and the Christian religious experience in Nigeria

This article explores the integration of the mobile phone into the religious experience of Christians in Nigeria. Based on the results of an online survey and the author’s observation, it argues that the mobile phone has become an actant in the mediatization of religion, creating dependency among some users and transforming religious praxis in palpable ways. Unsurprisingly, perspectives vary on whether and how the phone should be used during worship. Attitudes coalesce around three viewpoints, leading to the emergence of user groups labelled critics, advocates, and dualists. The accounts of study participants give access into the ways some people seek to (re)configure their engagement with religion by inserting the mobile phone as a multifunctional techno-spiritual gadget.

Religious education and the new cosmology

James Michael Lee (in Forging a better religious education in the third millennium, Religious Education Press, Birmingham, AL, 2000, p. 3) suggests that “religious education visions a broad sweeping future and then makes that future happen earlier than it would have happened if religious education were not there.” Religious Education thus has a prophetic role to play in society. The current generation is between stories—the religious and the scientific. How might religious education be developed in the Catholic school to reflect the growing convergence in theological discourse of the Christian Story with the New Universe Story? How might it energise young students with images that empower them to develop a prophetic stance towards their future and the future of humanity? We first consider the need for a paradigm shift in the way we tell the Christian Story. Then, taking our lead from the theology of Karl Rahner which allows us to take a cosmic view of Christian religious experience, and from various writers who apply such a view to different areas of Christian life, we attempt a synthesis of current theological thought. Lastly, we suggest how this shift might be applied to the religious education curriculum in order to provide an answer to the questions posed above.

A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States. By Bill J. Leonard . Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2014. xii + 379 pp. $31.47 paper.

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Levinas and the Significance of Passivity in the Christian Religious Experience

Abstract Analyzing the tendency of Christian believers to rationalize the religious experience of the face of the Other, I reveal through Levinas, how, in doing so, they paradoxically neglect to perceive God, who is love. I will focus on the appropriate response shown by both Levinas and Christ in the inter-human drama, specifically, that of passive kenosis, as opposed to self-preserving activity. In undergoing the an-archic passion of the Other, I encounter a possibility of transformation from my self qua ego which disconnects me from reality, to my self qua responsibility which throws me back into my finitude. This becomes most powerful upon experiencing the Crucifixion of Christ, as ‛I’, as active agent, become traumatically substituted by ‛me’, as passive recipient. When I surrender to this accusative gaze of the face of Christ which pierces my egoistic shell, I encounter, according to Levinas, the infinite demands of the vulnerable Other haunting me before ontological qualification. In this, I experience the trace of the inescapable Infinite who calls me to holiness. This holiness can only be reached if I cease to manipulate God, instead allowing him the freedom to do with me as he wills through the self-emptying passivity which Levinas describes.

The religious consumption fetishism: the use of experience in Christian religious context

Religion has always been present in humanity, given that its great importance, analyze the religious aspect in human life becomes something complex and comprehensive. This study has as its theme the use of Christian religious experience. The present research tries to understand if the consumption experience presents itself as a fetish of merchandise within the Christian religious world, being in the context of globalized neo-liberalism and consumer society. For carrying out such investigative in character exploratory qualitative research, will be held a bibliographical research, thus obtaining a consistent theoretical framework, based in the social sciences and Sciences of religion.

A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States by Bill J. Leonard

Reviewed by: A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States by Bill J. Leonard Emily Suzanne Clark A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States. By Bill J. Leonard. (Nashville: Abingdon Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 380. $45.00 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4267-5490-6). In A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States Bill Leonard offers a broad historical narrative that seeks “to define, describe, and analyze various elements of religious experience across a wide spectrum of religious communities where varying expressions of religious liberty and pluralism exist” (p. 3). Traversing the Atlantic Ocean, the book begins in sixteenth-century Europe and ends with the spiritual seekers of twenty-first-century America. Leonard provides a readable and approachable overview that will make an excellent read for those interested in learning about Christianity in America and will work well in an undergraduate classroom. Readers who are well versed in American Christian history will recognize all the usual suspects and key players, but they likely will learn some new, interesting details along the way. The first chapter outlines what Leonard means by the term religious experience with nods to William James, Mircea Eliade, Ann Taves, Rudolph Otto, and others. In short, Leonard is not interested in doctrine and dogma; rather, he focuses on what Christians did and how they felt. With such an aim, it is no surprise that the book’s title comes from Jonathan Edwards’s 1746 work A Treatise on Religious Affections (and Leonard references Edwards throughout the book). The chapters that follow take the reader through American Christian history and cover a wide range of individuals and communities. Chapters are both thematic and chronological, and they center on topics like colonial America, revivalism, liberal or esoteric Christian experience (transcendentalism and spiritualism), communitarianism, African American Christianity, Pentecostalism, Catholicism, and modern-day America. This is a wide range of American Christians and experiences, and Leonard brings them together in a narrative that reads and flows with [End Page 638] ease. Readers of The Catholic Historical Review will be particularly interested in chapter 9, which describes the development of American Catholicism, including John Gother’s colonial “Garden of the Soul” devotions, nineteenth-century immigration, Dorothy Day and Catholic social justice, the Second Vatican Council, and Thomas Merton. Despite the book’s attention to Christian diversity, it is still a traditional narrative of American Christianity. Although there is reference to colonial missions to Indians, Native Christian voices are noticeably lacking in A Sense of the Heart. At the close of the book’s first chapter, Leonard notes that his narrative will examine “the nature and diversity of religious experience in light of such distinct religiocultural issues as pluralism, voluntarism, religious freedom, democratic idealism, and Protestant privilege in the US” (p. 22). In light of the missing Indian experiences and the single chapter on black Christians, it might have been more accurate to write “white Protestant privilege.” Although it is a traditional story of American Christianity, with supplemental readings the book will work well in an undergraduate classroom. It provides a solid base narrative and introduces students to various theoretical ideas about religious experience. Leonard’s clear distillation of James, Taves, and others in chapter 1 provides a primer for reading and analyzing the religious experiences that abound in the following chapters. Emily Suzanne Clark Gonzaga University Copyright © 2016 The Catholic University of America Press

Leonard's "A sense of the heart: Christian religious experience in the United States" (Book Review)

Leonard's "A sense of the heart: Christian religious experience in the United States" (Book Review)

A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States

A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States

Characteristics of Extraordinary Religious Phenomena Accompanying the Christian Religious Experience—Reflection

This paper presents an attempt to discuss in more detail the question of understanding of religious experience in the context of the Christian religion, as well as to show the characteristic extraordinary religious experiences accompanying many people during that experience. The question of experiences evoked by psychedelic drugs, such as the issue of a vision and chemical ecstasy, are not discussed here, and instead the author has chosen to present only typical phenomena accompanying religious experience, which are caused by God’s doing, like visions, ecstasy, glossolalia (speaking in tongues) or stigmata. The paper also presents their role and contribution to the process of a human being’s religious development.

A Multiplicity of Washing Rites and a Multiplicity of Experiences

If experience can be defined as the affectively charged interaction with the world by means of the body as agency or medium, various sites of such affectively charged interaction mapped on to the body may be fruitfully analysed to explain the operations of religion as discourse. Baptism is one such site. In fact, baptism as the shorthand for of collective noun denoting a spectrum of ritual practices is a particularly apposite example. Baptism as ritual practice has had a varied history, both in terms of originary context as well as interpretive or discursive trajectories. This essay primarily tracks two such significant trajectories: the one being baptismal practices as purification rites operating in socially ‘heterodox’ early Jewish and early Christian groups within an apocalyptic, dissociative framework; the other being ‘orthodox’ baptismal discourse as expressed in, for instance, Cyril of Jerusalem’s Mystagogical Catheceses. In the former, the strong affect of dissociation is coupled with visionary experiences, hence its embeddedness in apocalyptic trajectories with their strongly dismissive stance to the surrounding world. In the case of the latter, the dramatic performances of the Easter liturgy, arguably, created the experience of salvation and resurrection. In both instances, the intersection of ritual, bodily experience, religious discourse, and social imaginaire provides the explanatory framework for baptism as foundational ritual practice in the making and maintenance of religious discourse and its attendant experiential effects. In this sense, such is the argument pursued in the essay, baptism is a core facet of early Jewish and early Christian religious experience.

PROBLEM (HRIŠĆANSKOG) RELIGIOZNOG ISKUSTVA: HAJDEGEROVA FENOMENOLOGIJA RELIGIJE

U svojim ranim radovima Hajdeger će putem analize hrišćanskog religioznogiskustva tematizovati problem faktičkog životnog iskustva. Cilj ovog rada je da osvetli karakterovog Hajdegerovog interesa za hrišćanstvo, te da potvrdi značaj dijaloga sa hrišćanskimmisliocima za formiranje njegove fundamentalne ontologije. Hajdegerove analize hrišćanstvatumače se u svetlu doprinosa filozofiji religije kao jednoj fenomenologiji religije.

Mysticism and the Psychology of Christian Religious Experience

Mysticism and the Psychology of Christian Religious Experience

The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity (review)

Reviewed by: The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity Andrew Louth The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity. By Patricia Cox Miller. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. Pp. viii, 263. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-812-24142-6.) This latest of Patricia Cox Miller’s books draws together two themes that have been her concerns for a long time: the holy and the bodily, or perhaps more precisely, saints and bodies. The links between the two have been noticed ever since scholars paid attention to the notion of the holy in late antiquity. In the first martyrdom account preserved, that of Polycarp, the faithful used to vie with one another to touch his body during his lifetime; after his death, his relics were important. Such respect, or rather, veneration, for the dead bodies of saints marked out Christians from pagans, who were horrified by bringing corpses into cities, the dwelling place of the living. The cult of icons, which developed out of the cult of relics, also concerns bodily elements. What Miller does in this book is to explore the various notions of bodily elements in late antiquity and also apply the methods and results of modern cultural theory, in particular “thing theory,” taken from the work of Bill Brown. There seem to be two aspects to Miller’s approach. On the one hand, she distinguishes various approaches to bodily elements connected with thing theory—i.e., the notion that in certain ways bodily objects become things, as opposed to mere objects—a focus of attention and significance, which is expressed in late-antique writing through ecphrasis and what Miller calls “visceral seeing” (p. 104). She also introduces notions such as the corporeal imagination of the book’s title and the notion of the “material turn” (p. 3). This latter notion sounds familiar, as it is present in Miller’s “linguistic turn” (in The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion [Burlington, VT, 2001], p. 6) and “cultural turn” (in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. Dale B. Martin and Miller, Durham, NC, 2005). On the other hand, Miller takes us through various ways in which the body becomes significant in late antiquity: the way in which the body becomes integral to the notion of selfhood; the significance of relics; and the way bodies are depicted, which leads naturally to the icon. Throughout, Miller provides examples, drawn from her extensive knowledge of the primary and secondary literature. She moves through the material at quite a pace and too frequently moves from one investigation to another before reaching any, if provisional, conclusion. In the end, it cannot be said that Miller’s discussion is comprehensive. There is no question that her subject is of immense importance. In the ascetic literature, to which she [End Page 514] pays less attention, it is increasingly evident how the very importance of ascetic practice, for all that it seems to be directed against the body, ultimately confers on the body central significance. The development of Eucharistic theology points in the same direction: It is our bodies that enable us to participate in the divine through the Eucharistic elements—something, as St. John Damascene points out, denied to the angels, so that in some sense we are superior to the angels through our bodies. Miller helps us to see the importance of the tangible in Christian religious experience in late antiquity, but the treatment is too episodic to be entirely satisfying. Andrew Louth University of Durham Copyright © 2010 The Catholic University of America Press

RESEARCH: "Religious Experience and Emotion: Evidence for Distinctive Cognitive Neural Patterns"

Categorical comparisons of neuroimaging data suggest that religious experience is cognitively mediated. Cognition involves coordinated integration of large-scale networks. The aim of this study was to distinguish neural networks mediating religious experience. A principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to cerebral blood flow data of a Christian religious experience and a happy emotion. Differences in variance patterns (PCs) were assessed. The religious experience and the emotion were distinguished by PC9, a neural network that evidenced two forms of expression: One involved prefrontal structures, which participate in social-relational cognition and which were shown previously to correlate with the religious state. Another involved cortical areas important for emotion-related language processing, reward, and action preparation. The results suggest that an essential dimension of religious experience involves social-relational cognition, mediated by a specific neocortical network.

Countering the ‘Nothing But’ Argument

My purpose in this article is to counter one type of argument often put forward in order to debunk religious experience. Those making this argument most aggressively are dogmatic naturalists who offer alternative explanations of religious experience, and then announce that, regardless of what the believer may think, all that is really going on is nothing but electrical and chemical changes in the brain, or regression to an infantile state (to mention only two examples). There are also, of course, people who are generally skeptical about religious experience and who think that it is impossible to decide between naturalistic and theistic explanations. And those of a Calvinist bent may have theologically based doubts about religious experience as a result of their deeply suspicious attitude toward the religion of the “natural man.” In this essay, I will discuss the naturalistically based doubts and not the theologically based ones, because the latter raise a whole different set of issues. I focus on Christian religious experience, and have written the paper as though it is addressed to an intelligent believer (sometimes addressed as “you”) who has had at least some experiences which he takes to be experiences of God, but who feels a bit shaken and at a loss about how to defend his conviction that he was, indeed, experiencing God against these types of doubts. Philosophers, in part under the influence of William James, have tended to concentrate on the dramatic, Damascus Road types of religious experiences, but that, I think, is misleading. Experiences of God are often quite subtle, and for that reason it is easy to begin to wonder afterwards whether what you experienced was really the presence of God, or whether there might be some other explanation for it.2 Naturalists who make the “nothing but” argument are not merely arguing that on occasion you might take something to be an experience of a COUNTERING THE ‘NOTHING BUT’ ARGUMENT

Beyond the Prime Mover of Aristotle: Faith and Reason in the Medieval Franciscan Tradition

7 Franciscan Studies 60 (2002) BEYOND THE PRIME MOVER OF ARISTOTLE: FAITH AND REASON IN THE MEDIEVAL FRANCISCAN TRADITION In his work entitled Metaphysics,1 the great Greek philosopher, Aristotle, leads the reader on a search for the knowledge of first causes. Such knowledge, he argues, transcends all other sciences. It is here that we find a clear statement of his argument for the theory of the four causes. Then, in book twelve of the same work, he leads us beyond the four causes to the Prime Mover. This, argues Aristotle, is pure being, pure actuality, total knowledge which has itself alone as its object.2 It is here that we encounter Aristotle’s God; a God defined as “noesis noeseos;” that is, “thought of thought.” This God is subsistent thought which eternally thinks itself in an eternal act of selfconsciousness .3 This God is not the creator of the world. In fact, Aristotle’s world has no creator, for it exists eternally, without beginning or end. And this God has no loving, providential care for the world or for human beings. But as pure, self-contained, monadic Being it is the transcendent end toward which all movement in the world is directed. In this sense it is “the object of the world’s desire.”4 In what sense would this Aristotelian understanding of God and the metaphysics in which it plays such an important role be seen as compatible with or coherent with the Christian understanding of God and of theology? This was a major question for Christian scholars of the thirteenth century. This was part of the problem involved at that time when, after centuries of familiar engagement with Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy, Western Christian culture came to a confrontation with this “new philosophy.” How can such a philosophy possibly be related to the tradition of Christian wisdom? Not all 1 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, tr. John H. McMahon (Amherst, N.Y., 1991). 2 Aristotle, op. cit., 12, 6-9. p. 255ff. 3 Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Development, tr. R. Robinson (Oxford University Press, 1962) 2nd edition, pbk, p. 346. Jaeger formulates Aristotle’s concept of the divine as follows: “ . . . thought thinks itself, and in this creative act it eternally enjoys its own absolute perfection.” 4 Jaeger, op. cit., p. 222. ZACHARY HAYES 8 scholars of the thirteenth century dealt with this question in the same way. We would like to discuss Bonaventure’s approach to the problem. The issue involves a perennial question of the relation between what is possible to pure, natural human reason on the one hand, and what insight might be possible in the light of the Christian religious experience on the other hand. While it is clear from Bonaventure’s writings that he was a metaphysical thinker, and while it is clear that he was quite familiar with the philosophy of Aristotle, it must also be said that he never took up the cause of the Aristotelian movement in the way that marks the work of his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas. The matter of Bonaventure’s assessment of Aristotle had been the subject of considerable debate among scholars of the twentieth century. At the present time, it is fair to say that Bonaventure related to Aristotle in a way that was respectful yet critical. Already in his early Sentence Commentary he calls Aristotle the “princeps et dux” of the Peripatetics.5 This seems to reflect a genuine respect for the Philosopher. His view involves a positive recognition of what the great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were able to accomplish. But respectful as he was, he was also critical, not hesitating to point out problems with the Aristotelian philosophy. In his Sentence Commentary6 Bonaventure expresses his conviction that Aristotle had made some serious mistakes. For example, the idea of the eternity of the world appeared to be in open contradiction with the biblical tradition concerning creation. In Bonaventure’s view, the most serious of these philosophical mistakes was Aristotle’s rejection of the Platonic theory of exemplarity. Bonaventure mentions this already in the Sentence Commentary,7 but the issue becomes even more obvious in the later Collations, both...

Cultural diversity enriching Christian religious experience

Cultural diversity enriching Christian religious experience