A reading of Being and Time

On the one hand, it appears that religious experiences are universal phenomena which cannot be reduced to cultural, linguistic, gendered, racial, religious, and other socially constructed markers of differentiation. From this viewpoint, the ubiquity of religious, mystical, and transcendental experiences affirms our common humanity inasmuch as it suggest each of us may access the ultimate, divine, and the sublime. On the other hand, it could be argued that religious experiences are prescribed, narrated, and practiced by us within our communities, which provide a social and linguistic context to anticipate and interpret our experiences. From this vantage point, it is argued that religious experience is bound up with language, beliefs, culture, and other factors which provide the expectation and explanation of what we define as religious experience. These two divergent viewpoints and scholarly approaches – known as Perennialism and Constructivism – will be employed and evaluated throughout this course on religious experience. Committed to an interdisciplinary approach, we will employ a range of frameworks across the historical; philosophical; sociological and theological disciplines for interpreting and interrogating experience. Amongst the canon of scholars who have written on religious experience, we evaluate the contributions of Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James, Rudolf Otto, Aldous Huxley, Ann Taves and Wayne Proudfoot. We will evaluate historical writings across several religious traditions, including the Christian tradition (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa; Augustine of Hippo; Meister Eckhart; Teresa of Ávila; Jonathan Edwards; Pentecostalism); Muslim tradition (e.g., Rabi`a Al-`Adawiyya; Rumi; Sufism; and Malcolm X); Buddhist tradition (e.g., Zen; D.T. Suzuki); and Transcendentalism (e.g., Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry David Thoreau). Recognizing that religious experiences are embodied and culturally located, we will reflect upon the role of race and gender by evaluating the contributions of Valerie Saiving; Ada María Isasi- Díaz; Delores Williams and James Cone. Other than these two textbooks, all assigned readings will be provided on Canvas.

2020

In the modern age, religion seems to have abandoned its role as a symbol of meaning to the extent that, conversely, the scientific, rational view of the world has taken over this task. Apparently, there is an exclusive relationship between the two that makes a peaceful and equal coexistence more or less impossible. In this volume of the series "Philosophy and Psychology in Dialogue", Martin Klüners and Jörn Rüsen analyse the role religion plays in human existence and life. While Klüners interprets religion historically as a "pre-scientific" science of the soul and sees the antagonism between the reality principle and the pleasure principle as causally responsible for the opposition between reason and faith, Rüsen locates religion within historical thinking. Like history itself, religion appears as a significant factor in the cultural orientation of human life practice.

An exploration of method and theory in the study of religion looking at phenomenology, anthropology, theology, etc. as well as interreligious studies, the Insider/Outsider debate and such themes.

The Irreducibility of Religion and the Need for Religious Studies Attempts to define religion over the past century have largely looked to already existing methods of study to elucidate how religions ought to be analyzed. Scholars, approaching religious study with perspectives ranging from philosophical to sociological to anthropological, quickly discovered that their conclusions vastly differed; the possibility of obtaining a consistent answer which universally applied to all religions seemed to fade if not vanish.

2018

In ordinary language a clear distinction is made between the world of matter and that of spirit. While dualism is typically thought to be incompatible with behaviorism, a behavioral analysis of self-awareness suggests that there are good reasons for dualistic talk. Reputed qualifies of both the spiritual aspect of humans and of a metaphysical God seem to flow naturally from the analysis. The use of the spiritual facet of self in therapy is briefly discussed. The purpose of the present paper is to attempt to analyze the distinction between matter and spirit from a behavioral point of view. I have three major reasons to attempt such an analysis. First, it is obvious that spiritual concerns exert an enormous influence over the behavior of many, if not most, of the members of our culture. Popular books on religion, mysticism, meditation, and spiritual growth are consistent sellers. Spiritual leaders are followed the world over. We spend billions of dollars each year on spiritual enhancement, from growth-oriented therapies to organized religion. Second, despite calls for a change in this area (Miller, 1984; Schoenfeld, 1979), there have been relatively few attempts to conduct behavioral theoretical analyses of such concerns. Those that have been done have largely focused on the development of superstition, or on the moralizing influence of organized religion (e.g., Skinner, 1953). While these are important topics, they are relatively easy to analyze in terms of principles of reinforcement or cultural survival. The matter/spirit distinction per se is more difficult to understand, but it is also more interesting in many ways. I intend to focus on the nature of the distinction as it is talked about in Western culture, while avoiding issues about the regulative, moralizing influence of organized religion. Third, I believe that a behavioral analysis of spirituality leads to important outcomes for a behavioral view of several other topics, including self-awareness, and therapeutic processes.

PsycTESTS Dataset, 2000

An expanded model to conceptualize sacred human experiences is discussed wherein the term Spirituality is broadened to include: (1) Ritualistic Spirituality, (2) Theistic Spirituality, and (3) Existential Spirituality. However, a measure incorporating this expanded model does not yet exist. A 67-item self-report questionnaire was developed and data were collected from 1,301 undergraduate students. A series of factor analytic procedures yielded a three-factor structure consistent with the guiding theoretical model and refinement produced three 10-item subscales. Evidence for construct validity and sound psychometric properties was indicative of a reliable, valid, and unique tool to assess the multidimensional nature of spirituality.

The papers we presented in this volume focus on the phenomenological investigation of the religious phenomena. Scholars belonging to different phenomenological traditions addressed the following groups of questions in order to describe the structure that makes a phenomenon religious. First, is it actually possible to talk about religious experience? In this issue we decided not to give a final answer, but rather to refer to religious experience as the religious structure of the phenomena. In fact, the main question that informs our current literature is: could there be a phenomenology of religious experience? Secondly, we would like to ponder what different forms of phenomenological investigations can add to the description of the religious structure of the phenomena. In this case we referred to the philosophical and psychological reflection of Dewey's, Husserl's, Heidegger's, Ricoeur's, James' and so forth, in order to shed light on religious phenomena. Thirdly, we would like to address the question that gives the title to this issue: Do these phenomena present themselves as religious or is their structure as it interacts with our sense of self, our beliefs, our sense of the sacred and our transcendental attitude that attribute the phenomena a religious color? Can a religious sentiment be grounded in a perceptual and experiential quality? Or is our way of relating to neutral matter that colors them in a theological and axiological quality? Anna Varga-Jani approached religious experience through a twofold phenomenological investigation aimed at discovering, (1) how religious experiences reflected on reality, and (2) how the methodology of phenomenology lead to the wider ontology of theology. These two divergent approaches to religious experiences found their source in the phenomenological reflection on reality, and this reality, in view of the substantially non-real experience of religiosity, urged the creation of a new ontology in the donation of revelation. Ricoeur's phenomenological approach was used to inquiry into this layer of reality. Drawing on Husserl's egology, Marc Applebaum's contribution Remembrance: A Husserlian Phenomenology of Sufi Practice, discussed the traditional Sufi practice of " remembrance of God " (dhikr), which can be understood as " the primary meditative practice " within Islam (Elias 2013, 199). The aim was to describe dhikr as a religious phenomenon consisting in turning from a condition of heedlessness and duality to a unitive experience of remembering God and being remembered by God. Remembrance was framed not as a metaphysical doctrine but as a lived-experience situated in the practice of classical Sufism, traditionally understood as a lifelong, sapiential path.