The Significance of Religious Experience

The Significance of Religious Experience PDF Author: Howard Wettstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190226757
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book

Book Description
In this volume of essays, Howard Wettstein explores the foundations of religious commitment. His orientation is broadly naturalistic, but not in the mode of reductionism or eliminativism. This collection explores questions of broad religious interest, but does so through a focus on the author's religious tradition, Judaism. Among the issues explored are the nature and role of awe, ritual, doctrine, religious experience; the distinction between belief and faith; problems of evil and suffering with special attention to the Book of Job and to the Akedah, the biblical story of the binding of Isaac; the virtue of forgiveness. One of the book's highlights is its literary (as opposed to philosophical) approach to theology that at the same time makes room for philosophical exploration of religion. Another is Wettstein's rejection of the usual picture that sees religious life as sitting atop a distinctive metaphysical foundation, one that stands in need of epistemological justification.

The Significance of Religious Experience

The Significance of Religious Experience PDF Author: Howard Wettstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190226757
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book

Book Description
In this volume of essays, Howard Wettstein explores the foundations of religious commitment. His orientation is broadly naturalistic, but not in the mode of reductionism or eliminativism. This collection explores questions of broad religious interest, but does so through a focus on the author's religious tradition, Judaism. Among the issues explored are the nature and role of awe, ritual, doctrine, religious experience; the distinction between belief and faith; problems of evil and suffering with special attention to the Book of Job and to the Akedah, the biblical story of the binding of Isaac; the virtue of forgiveness. One of the book's highlights is its literary (as opposed to philosophical) approach to theology that at the same time makes room for philosophical exploration of religion. Another is Wettstein's rejection of the usual picture that sees religious life as sitting atop a distinctive metaphysical foundation, one that stands in need of epistemological justification.

Handbook of Religious Experience

Handbook of Religious Experience PDF Author: Ralph W. Hood
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780891350941
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 661

Get Book

Book Description
HANDBOOK OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is generally recognized as the classic book on the psychology of religious experience. It is the gold standard against which other books in this field are measured. This monumental volume examines in great breadth and depth the nature, roots, ecology, expressions, explanations, and facilitational modes of religious experience. Ultimately, religious experience is central since it is the source, context, and validation of all religion, all religious activities, and all theories of religion. Scripture and sacrament are basically religious experiences. Religious experience is basically the encounter with God in its highest form.

Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God

Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God PDF Author: Harold A. Netland
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1493434896
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Get Book

Book Description
For many Christians, personal experiences of God provide an important ground or justification for accepting the truth of the gospel. But we are sometimes mistaken about our experiences, and followers of other religions also provide impressive testimonies to support their religious beliefs. This book explores from a philosophical and theological perspective the viability of divine encounters as support for belief in God, arguing that some religious experiences can be accepted as genuine experiences of God and can provide evidence for Christian beliefs.

Religious Experience Reconsidered

Religious Experience Reconsidered PDF Author: Ann Taves
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069114088X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book

Book Description
Annotation Ann Taves addresses the subject of religious experience directly and the problems of reductionism and humanistic fears of the sciences indirectly and by example. The orientation of this book is practical more than philosophical.

Religious Experience

Religious Experience PDF Author: Wayne Proudfoot
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520908503
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book

Book Description
How is religious experience to be identified, described, analyzed and explained? Is it independent of concepts, beliefs, and practices? How can we account for its authority? Under what conditions might a person identify his or her experience as religious? Wayne Proudfoot shows that concepts, beliefs, and linguistic practices are presupposed by the rules governing this identification of an experience as religious. Some of these characteristics can be understood by attending to the conditions of experience, among which are beliefs about how experience is to be explained.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience PDF Author: William James
Publisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1877527467
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 824

Get Book

Book Description
Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

The Epistemology of Religious Experience

The Epistemology of Religious Experience PDF Author: Keith E. Yandell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521477413
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book

Book Description
Arguing against the notion that religious experience is ineffable, while advocating the view that it can provide evidence of God's existence, this text contends that social science and nonreligious explanations of religious belief and experience do not cancel out the force of the experience.

Religious Experience

Religious Experience PDF Author: Craig Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317545699
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
Many regard religious experience as the essence of religion, arguing that narratives might be created and rituals invented but that these are always secondary to the original experience itself. However, the concept of "experience" has come under increasing fire from a range of critics and theorists. This Reader presents writings from both those who assume the existence and possible universality of religious experience and those who question the very rhetoric of "experience". Bringing together both classic and contemporary writings, the Reader showcases differing disciplinary approaches to the study of religious experience: philosophy, literary and cultural theory, history, psychology, anthropology; feminist theory; as well as writings from within religious studies. The essays are structured into pairs, with each essay separately introduced with information on its historical and intellectual context. The ultimate aim of the Reader is to enable students to explore religious experience as rhetoric created to authorize social identities. The book will be an invaluable introduction to the key ideas and approaches for students of Religion, as well as Sociology and Anthropology. CONTRIBUTORS: Robert Desjarlais, Diana Eck, William James, Craig Martin, Russell T. McCutcheon, Wayne Proudfoot, Robert Sharf, Ann Taves, Charles Taylor, Joachim Wach, Joan Wallach Scott, Raymond Williams

An Introduction to Religious and Spiritual Experience

An Introduction to Religious and Spiritual Experience PDF Author: Marianne Rankin
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826498213
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
Spiritual experiences, mystical and near-death incidences are interpreted from scientific, philosophical and religious viewpoints.

The Neuroscience of Religious Experience

The Neuroscience of Religious Experience PDF Author: Patrick McNamara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139483560
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book

Book Description
Technical advances in the life and medical sciences have revolutionised our understanding of the brain, while the emerging disciplines of social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience continue to reveal the connections of the higher cognitive functions and emotional states associated with religious experience to underlying brain states. At the same time, a host of developing theories in psychology and anthropology posit evolutionary explanations for the ubiquity and persistence of religious beliefs and the reports of religious experiences across human cultures, while gesturing toward physical bases for these behaviours. What is missing from this literature is a strong voice speaking to these behavioural and social scientists - as well as to the intellectually curious in the religious studies community - from the perspective of a brain scientist.