Forms Of Religious Experience Research Articles

To Laugh in a Pluralistic Universe: William James and the Philosophy of Humor

Abstract The purpose of this article is to enlist the work of the American philosopher and psychologist William James in order to investigate the deeper significance of humor. It is neither James’s character nor anything he states directly about humor or laughter that is under discussion here, but the cosmos as grasped through his bold metaphysics and rich phenomenological observations. The thought of James, it is argued, discloses our inherence within a universe rife with ambiguity, complexity, and incongruity. I explore how these features of reality, particularly when illuminated through James’s lush prose, may cause us to laugh. In addition, the insights of James are employed to examine the close relationship between humor and certain forms of religious experience, as well as with horror.

Introduction: The Religious Structure of Phenomena—A Phenomenological Investigation

Introduction: The Religious Structure of Phenomena—A Phenomenological Investigation

Religious Emotion as a Form of Religious Experience

ABSTRACT This article argues that religious emotions are variations of general emotions that we already know from our everyday life, which nevertheless exhibit specific features that enable us to think of them as forming a coherent subclass. The article claims that there is an experience of joy, sorrow, regret, fear, and so on that is specifically religious. The aim is to develop an account that specifies what makes them “religious.” The argument is developed in three stages. The first section develops a phenomenologically inspired account of the emotions by focusing on three of their moments: phenomenal quality, cognitive dependency, and intentionality. Drawing on this theory, section 2 distinguishes the class of religious emotions from similar phenomena. The third and final section examines the main features of religious emotions.

Religious Experience: Experience of Transparency and Resonance

Abstract At a time in which religion is breaking away from the normative power of its traditions and new forms of spiritual experience are emerging, religious philosophy must find criteria for what a religious experience is and how to judge its truth. In their empirical critique of religion L. Wittgenstein and R. Carnap accepted two forms of religious experience, which they described with an optical and acoustic metaphor. They denied their cognitive truth value, but not their value for life. However, an extended concept of truth, which encompasses every correspondence between experience and reality, can also find truth in religious experiences of “transparency” and “resonance”. They differ from aesthetic experience not only by the depth of transparency and resonance, but also by their cognitive interpretation. What is experienced is cognitively referred to a final reality: either to a “summum ens” in this world, or to the whole of this world or something unknown beyond of this world. This final point of reference is a unity of “being” and “value”. Religion makes experiences of the everyday transparent for both aspects of an ultimate reality und motivates to a life full of resonance with this reality.

African American religions, 1500-2000: colonialism, democracy, and freedom

This book provides a narrative historical, postcolonial account of African American religions. It examines the intersection of Black religion and colonialism over several centuries to explain the relationship between empire and democratic freedom. Rather than treating freedom and its others (colonialism, slavery and racism) as opposites, Sylvester A. Johnson interprets multiple periods of Black religious history to discern how Atlantic empires (particularly that of the United States) simultaneously enabled the emergence of particular forms of religious experience and freedom movements as well as disturbing patterns of violent domination. Johnson explains theories of matter and spirit that shaped early indigenous religious movements in Africa, Black political religion responding to the American racial state, the creation of Liberia, and FBI repression of Black religious movements in the twentieth century. By combining historical methods with theoretical analysis, Johnson explains the seeming contradictions that have shaped Black religions in the modern era.

A Biopsychosocial Approach to Creative Dissociation: Remarks on a Case of Mediumistic Painting

A category of religious experience that still preserves much of the original blurring and fusion between art and religion is mediumistic or spirit painting. Performed by spiritualist mediums in different locations around the world, this form of religious experience is characterized by the supposed ability of an individual to serve as an instrument for deceased artists to continue to perform their works. In the manner of so-called automatic writing, mediums try to reproduce aspects of the style of deceased painters, in order to demonstrate their identity and survival of bodily death. Little scientific research has been conducted concerning this topic. We present a brief analysis of painting activity performed by Jacques Andrade, a Brazilian medium. Born in 1945, Andrade, who has been active in the Brazilian Kardecist movement for many years, has dedicated most of his religious life to mediumistic painting at his center (The Leonardo da Vinci Salon of Mediumistic Art). Data about the medium were collected on several different occasions, from 1998 to 2013, and include psychophysiological measures (hand temperature, heart rate, bilateral skin conductance, muscle tension, and electrical brain activity), psychological measures (Dissociative Experiences Scale, Tellegen Absorption Scale, Revised Transliminality Scale, and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire), artistic material, observational data (photographs of paintings, observations of the medium in action), and some basic socio-demographic and biographical information. Basically we sought to evaluate: a) general aspects of the painting technique and style employed by the medium, b) the main features of his pictorial production, and c) the general behavior shown by the medium during the mediumistic activity. In an effort to combine and integrate our findings about this case, we propose a biopsychosocial approach to the study of what might be called creative dissociation. NeuroQuantology | December 2013 | Volume 11 | Issue 4 | Page 544-572

How to Avoid Moralism, Apologetics, and Intimidation

How to Avoid Moralism, Apologetics, and Intimidation

Guerra y guerra. La modernidad apocalíptica de Thomas Müntzer a León Tolstói

This article discusses the philosophical significance of Leo Tolstoy for european modernity, in dialogue with a number of writers and authors that provide an alternative way of thinking confronted to the hegemonic ideas on how the modern conscioussnes was born. The authors addressed here cover a large time span, ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: Thomas Muntzer, Jean-Paul and Carlo Michelstaedter. The hypothesis of this essay argues that european Modernity was strongly influenced by new forms of religious experience that helped to extend across the continent a rupturistic sense of consummation of historical time. The primary aim of this paper is to show the role that certain apocalyptic tone played in Tolstoi’s late work, a tone highly syntomatic of the deep crisis experienced in the religious-political sphere at the beginnig of the twentieth century.

Dorothea von Montau and the Masters of Prague

Dorothea von Montau has conventionally been viewed as an isolated figure. This article aims to shift the focus away from Dorothea as a historical individual, and onto the body of heavily theological texts which treat Dorothea produced by her confessor, Johannes Marienwerder. It builds on recent work which regards the canons of the Pomesanian cathedral chapter at Marienwerder as more significant than the Teutonic Order for the promotion of Dorothea's cause. It explores the long-standing association between Johannes Marienwerder and the more famous figure of Matthaeus of Cracow, and locates them amongst a wider group of German-speaking senior masters at the university of Prague in the later fourteenth century with shared interests in the inspired word, revelatory writing (notably the Revelationes of Birgitta of Sweden), and the active pastoration of religious women. Narrative accounts of the involvement of Johannes and Matthaeus in the pastoral supervision of lay women enjoying mystical forms of religious experience, contained in hitherto unedited texts written by the archbishop Jan of Jenštejn, offer parallel evidence which, for the first time, permits a comparative study of Johannes' later writing on Dorothea. The appendix provides an edition of an extract from Jan of Jenštejn's De bono mortis.

Political Hesychasm? Vladimir Petrunin’s Neo-Byzantine Interpretation of the Social Doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church

Hesychasm is a Christian Orthodox mystical and ascetic tradition that has its roots in the monastic life of early Byzantium. It denotes a method of prayer and a way of life in monastic community, and it describes the overall process of orienting a person's entire being towards an experience of the Divine.1 Asceticism and experiences of self- transcendence are phenomena we encounter in every religion; suffice to think about Sufi Islam, Zen Buddhism or Yoga. Orthodoxy knows the practice of hesychasm, and what is indeed noteworthy about this is that Orthodoxy preserves a Christian ascetic and mystical tradition throughout history, whereas in Western Christianity forms of spiritual exercises and mysticism come to play a minor role. The twentieth century brings about a revival of interest in hesychasm both in Eastern as well as Western Christian theology, a revival that Sergej Khoruzij describes as "anthropological turn in Christian theology" and connects with the names of Georgij Florovskij, Sergej Bulgakov and John Meyendorff on the part of Orthodoxy, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Yves Congar on the part of Catholicism.2 From this theological perspective, hesychasm stands for a form of religious experience and becomes indicative of an anthropological discourse that preserves a sensibility for experiences of self-transcendence.3 If this is the theological and practical meaning of hesychasm, what is political hesychasm? I first encountered the term in the title of the book Politiceskij isikhazm i ego tradicii v social' noj koncepcii Moskovskogo Patriarkha, published by the Aleteija publishing house in Saint Petersburg in 2009 in the series Library of

Rethinking Global Philosophy of Religion

In the opening lines of her Preface to Philosophy of Religion, Gwen GriffithDickson rightly notes that The academic area of 'philosophy of religion' has traditionally worked almost exclusively with the philosophies and religions of Western civilization/' In recent times there have been a few notable attempts to address this situation by way of authoring textbooks that include the work of thinkers, both traditional and modern, from other non-Western cultures in the treatment of central issues in contemporary philosophy of religion. In my judgment, Griffith-Dickson's text is by far the most comprehensive, inclusive, and insightful of its kind. She at once exposits and interprets the major thinkers in the Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions (with passing references to East Asian cultures) as well as leading mainline Western philosophers such as Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Berkeley, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. book consists of three parts. first is largely introductory and focuses on questions of religious pluralism, similarities and differences between religiophilosophical debates within and between different faiths, and the nature of religious language. second part consists of an analysis of various metaphysical and epistemological themes such as creation, natural theology, and how the world seems/' Part 3 is labeled The Divine and Human Relationship and includes discussions of the persistent problem of evil and the nature of various forms of religious experience. Philosophy of Religion is designed as a textbook for advanced undergraduate students and is written with great clarity and precision. author is able in her expositions and interpretations to get into the heart of an amazing range of quite different thinkers and the diverse styles of reasoning embedded in the traditions she explores. She is also able to present forcefully some of her own ideas. I would like to illustrate this briefly by her sophisticated treatment of the problem that from the beginning has been the most challenging to Theism, the problem of and pose a final question to her. In chapter 11, Explanations of Evil, GriffithDickson covers the usual territory regarding the reality (or non-reality) of various theodicies that seek to justify God or the gods for allowing evil, and related issues. She concludes:

Pilgrims and Progress: The Production of Religious Experience in a Korean Religion

Since its inception, Chondogyo has self-consciously maintained an identity as a "new" and "modern" Korean religion. These claims have seen ongoing efforts to rationalize religious practice and theology and purge the movement of "anti-modern," "superstitious" elements. This article explores the differing receptions of pilgrimage and ecstatic trance within the organization: the two major forms of embodied religious experience in Chondogyo. While the former has been actively promoted as a "legitimate" (and modern) form of religious experience, the latter is treated with ambivalence and is often connected with backward superstition. Through a comparison of these practices, I explore the ways in which they intersect with, bolster and challenge conceptions of Korean modernity.

The Virgin, The Princess, and The Goddess: A Field Report and Analysis of Pagan and Christian Symbolism in a Roman Catholic Religious Celebration of Northern Chile

This article represents an early attempt to organize a communications study of a Roman Catholic religious celebration situated in the Andes Mountains of northern Chile. Although the rites and symbols of traditional religious festivals are more likely to draw the attention of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists than communication scholars, I believe such environments are fascinating and fertile sites for media ecologists to explore. The first part of this article integrates the work of several ethnographers who have studied the feast with my own observations made during a field visit there in July 2001. The second part of the article proceeds with a media ecological analysis by placing the feast within an historical context that highlights the symbolic differences between oral and literate forms of religious experience. The article concludes that the existing clash of pagan and Christian symbolism within the feast can at least partially be explained by the contrast between oral and literate forms of symbolism.

Compositional science and religious philosophy

Religious thought often assumes that the principle of physical causal completeness (PCC) is false. But those who explicitly deny or doubt PCC, including William Alston, W. D. Hart, Tim Crane, Paul Moser and David Yandell, Charles Taliaferro, Keith Yandell, Dallas Willard, William Vallicella, Frank Dilley, and, recently, David Chalmers, have ignored not only the explicit but also the implicit grounds for acceptance of PCC. I review the explicit grounds, and extend the hitherto implicit grounds, which together constitute a greater challenge to contemporary religious philosophy than has been realized. Religious philosophers need to find a better way around PCC than has been found, or, if PCC is unavoidable, religious philosophers need to work toward a worldview that both accepts PCC and defends strong forms of religious experience.

WHAT DO WE EXPERIENCE IF WE HAVE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE?

AbstractThe starting point of the paper is the historical fact that people who have special forms of religious experience such as seeing saints, angels, gods or goddesses can always say whom they saw. They never met anyone totally unknown to them. The question is why. The answer that the paper proposes and invites to discuss is that having experience means to identify what is happening with what is known as pattern of interpretation. The knowledge of those patterns is due either to socialisation or to further studies in favour of, or against, those patterns, yet, it is unlikely that something totally new will ever be discovered through those forms of religious experience.

The Cultural Context of Stage Models of Religious Experience

The stage model of religious experience proposed by Edwards and Lowis (this issue), like that of Batson, Schoenrade, and Ventis (1993), has its cultural origins in Puritan and Pietist Christian understandings of religious conversion. Within that context it has validity and explanatory power. It may also have some application to other religious cultures, in particular to those kinds of religious experience that are especially associated with existential crisis. However, even within those versions of Christianity where the model does apply, there are other forms of religious experience that do not appear to have this structure. The major problem with offering a general model of religious experience is that the term has been applied to such a wide variety of human experience and in such a variety of cultures that its meaning has become protean. Attempts to make generalizations about religious experience are more likely to have success when they concentrate on those aspects of the experience that transcend cultural specifics, that is to say the psychological and biological structures that are common to all members of the human species.

Social and Spiritual Capital: Building ‘Emotional Resilience’ In Communities and Individuals

The article examines the relationship between mental health, mental health promotion, religious communities and general issues of public health. It begins with an exploration of what is meant by mental health drawing a distinction between it, mental illness and mental health promotion, and argues that mental health can have a profound impact on physical health. The relationship between religious communities and the mentally ill is analysed next. Despite the attitudes of many in mental health provision, religious communities can offer a supportive environment for the mentally ill. The article avoids a ‘faith communities—good’, ‘mental health services—bad’ dichotomy, recognizing that religious communities can be excluding and discriminatory. The ambiguity of some experiences is recognized: are they forms of religious experience or symptoms of psychosis? The article highlights the inceasing advocacy of the user/survivor movement. In the final section, the relationship between mental health and public health is explored. It is suggested that religious communities can be places for the promotion of mental health. Mental health promotion is understood as aiming to strengthen both individuals and communities; its value is explored in relation to public health issues. It is suggested that those who are socially excluded are at a greater risk of some form of mental illness and that this may well impact on their physical health. Related to this are the beneficial effects of opportunities for participation in decision making, be it in the workplace or the local community. The article ends by arguing that service providers and service users need to be involved in decisions and planning. Further, some elements of mental health promotion will need to involve those outside the statutory sector.

Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (review)

Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. Edited by Catherine Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 277. $39.95 clothbound; $19.95 paperback.) This collection of essays manages to do what other collections only claim to do: to make a single, coherent argument. The premise of the collection, suggested by Caroline Bynum in her foreword, is that saints together with their biographers and audiences socially construct themselves. Historians of the 1970's dealt with this concept by synthesizing saints' histories to find recoverable patterns; in the 1980's, scholars reduced saints' vitae to single-case .histories. This group of essays focuses on female saints of the later Middle Ages and asserts that women's own holy voices are recoverable, as is the process of negotiation between female and male religious that led to the recording of women's vitae. Mooney, the volume's editor, sets out the three main questions addressed by the volume: How to get at the voices of female saints and male interpreters in co-authored texts? How are these various voices gendered? And what were the influences of genre upon the lives of medieval saints? Every essay in the book treats the same process whereby a woman and man (or men) worked together to produce texts about saints. Barbara Newman treats the versions of Hildegard of Bingen's life, beginning with Hildegard's own autobiographical material and the subsequent revisions practiced by her three biographers. Anne Clark, working on Elisabeth of Schonau, describes the mutual dynamic by which Elisabeth and her brother Ekbert produced a sometimes conflicting picture of Elisabeth as religious activist and passive female mystic. Catherine Mooney's extraordinary essay compares St. Clare's own vision of herself as an imitator of Jesus with later, dubious texts attributed to Clare which cast her instead as a feminized imitator of Francis; Franciscan writers were determined to refashion Clare and her followers as typical female religious practicing imitatio Mariae rather than active practitioners of the imitatio Christi like Francis himself. Amy Hollywood uses her study of Beatrice of Nazareth to criticize historians' identification of women's religiosity with the physical body She shows how women resisted this form of religious experience prescribed to them by male-authored texts. While male authors exteriorized her interior ecstasies as bodily experiences, Beatrice's own texts insisted upon an intense interiority that freed her soul entirely from all bodily restraints. John Coakley meanwhile, shows how Christine of Stommeln and Peter of Dacia worked together to create a two-point program of sanctity for Christine. Peter cast her as a bride of Christ, but Christine herself focused on her direct mystical contact with God. Peter theologized and appropriated Christine's experience by casting himself, in his writings, as sister of the bride. Together, the two presented insider and outsider versions of Christine's sanctity Frank Tobin analyzes the co-operative vita produced by Henry Suso and his assistant, Elsbeth Stagel. In a reverse of the usual process, Elsbeth's writings contributed to Suso's own auto-hagiography Although modern scholars take Suso's reports of ELsbeth's help as a topos, Tobin insists upon Elsbeth's actual participation in the text. …

Religious Experience: A Sociological Perspective

This paper draws on a wide range of researches to stress the importance of social context to the sociological understanding of religious experiences. It argues that individualistic definitions fail to take into account real group experiences such as those resulting from the reforms of Vatican II. For the sociologist, it is important to explore general patterns of group experiences and the meanings attributed to them. The paper discusses some of the methodological and conceptual problems in this area before considering evidence for the patterning of religious experience according to differences of generation, gender, class, level of urbanization, institutional involvement, and status inconsistency. The paper concludes by locating religious experiences in the context of modernity. In contrast to related theories of secularization, it draws attention to the recent work of Hervieu‐Léger which suggests that utopian future expectations create space which can only be met by new forms of religious experience.

Religion et société: Hypothèses de relecture des mouvements hérétiques

It is the author's hypothesis that the history of Christian heretical movements can be revisited from the point of view of the relationship — which could be described, in some of its aspects, as paradoxical — between the two extreme forms of religious experience and political experience: mysticism, as the highest degree of interior experience, and armed popular revolution, as the most radical moment of political engagement. The radical movement of the Reformation, Thomas Müntzer's thought and the events of the German Peasant War of 1525 are selected as a starting point because of their capacity to represent the most complete and coherent model of such a relationship, a model which, when projected over the entire span of the history of heretical movements of Christianity's second millennium, will yield interesting insights.