Response to Gracia Fay Ellwood's “Religious Experience,Religious Worldviews,and Near-Death Studies”

After a brief glance at religious wars that now embroil the field of near-death studies, I respond to Gracia Fay Ellwood's commentary on Light & Death (Sabom, 1998), in which she alleges serious problems with my discussion of Raymond Moody's research, my views on the psychic and the occult, my use of the Bible as an authoritative document, my research methodology, and my definition of Christianity.     

A “Little Death”: The Near-Death Experience and Tibetan Delogs

A phenomenon remarkably like the near-death experience has been uncovered in Tibetan culture, aside from the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (Thurman, 1994). Anthropologists have gathered accounts of contemporary and historical cases of remarkable people called delogs. Seemingly dead for several hours or days, these people revive spontaneously and tell detailed accounts of otherworldly journeys. Their journey accounts contain elaborate versions of Buddhist otherworldly landscapes and characters, emphasizing the moral and spiritual teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. These delogs are a bridge between contemporary near-death experiences and ancient shamanic practices.     

Mourning,Melancholia and Religious Studies: Is the “Lost Object” Really Lost?

This reflection on the book /Mourning and Religion/ (2008) offers a reading of Freud’s foundational text /Mourning and Melancholia/ in which the relationship between mourning and melancholia is theorized slightly differently from that in /Mourning and Religion./ Mourning and melancholia are here seen as clinically distinct responses to object loss: melancholia resulting from a more unconsciously ambivalent and complex relationship to the lost object. And drawing on the work of Hans Loewald, mourning is understood as more dialectical and less linear. Some implications of these models of mourning and melancholia for a psychoanalysis of the origin of the field of religious studies are mentioned.     

Theology and Religious Studies in the University: ‘Some Ambiguities ’ Revisited

What is the relationship between religious studies and theology? Do both have a place within the university? This paper will argue that no clear distinction can be drawn between religious studies and theology on the level of the methods they employ. Each is multidisciplinary and each is able to address questions of religious truth. They can be distinguished only by asking ‘What is the question which each is attempting to answer? ’ Religious studies addresses the question of the meaning and truth of any religion. Theology is interested in the question of the meaning and truth of one particular faith. By adopting the language of one particular faith, the theologian is able to explore particular religious questions in some depth.     

“Not Being Counted”: Women's Place and Religious Space in Jewish Orthodox Communities During the COVID-19 Crisis

This article draws on the anthropology of crisis to analyze ways in which communal-religious responses to crisis situations can reveal engrained social and cultural structures, and especially their gendered aspects. We focus on two alternative forms of Jewish communal prayer service that emerged in Orthodox communities in Israel during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: street and balcony minyans. Based on interviews and texts, we explore Orthodox women's experiences of these new religious spaces that entailed the rearrangement of traditional gender and spatial boundaries. We show that while these spaces opened room for new religious experiences for women, they ultimately accentuated their experiences of exclusion. We argue that the destabilization of the physical religious space in these alternative communal prayers reinforced symbolic gender boundaries. Thus, our study not only demonstrates how crises can uncover the deep social grammar of a community, but also how they unearth processes that defy and challenge that grammar.     

Making Sense of Suffering and Death: How Health Care Providers’ Construct Meanings in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

Biomedical technology has progressed at a pace that has created a new set of patient care dilemmas. Health care providers in intensive care units where life-sustaining therapies are both initiated and withdrawn encounter clinical scenarios that raise new existential, theological, and moral questions. We hypothesized that there might be broad patterns in how such staff understand these questions and make sense and meaning from their work. Such meaning making might be the key to working with the critically ill and dying while helping to create and sustain a meaningful context for personal living. This article presents themes evident in an in depth analysis of open-text responses to a spiritual and religious questionnaire survey completed by staff in one neonatal intensive care unit. The data reveal the central roles of perceived infant suffering and death in these providers’ work experience and details how they understand the ultimate meaning of the suffering and death. We investigate patterns in how different providers articulate their individual attributes and motivations for working in intensive care. We found a surprising range of religious, spiritual, existential, and other meaning-making systems that underpin how staffs understand their work and how, certain of them, even define their purpose in life as caring for critically ill infants and their families.Wendy Cadge received her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University. Her research examines a range of topics related to religion in contemporary American life including religious pluralism, religion & immigration, religion & sexuality, and religion & the arts. Her first book is titled, Heartwood: the First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Dr. Cadge’s current research focuses on the history, presence, and significance of religion and spirituality in American hospitals. Elizabeth A. Catlin is a senior faculty neonatologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Catlin completed general pediatric training at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, followed by subspecialty training in neonatal–perinatal medicine at Brown University School of Medicine, Providence, Rhode Island. Dr. Catlin served as Chief of Neonatology at MGH from 1992 to 2004. She completed a Kenneth B. Schwartz Foundation fellowship in Clinical Pastoral Education in 1999. Dr. Catlin has a long-standing interest in spiritual distress, tragic decision-making, suffering, bereavement, and religious components of patient care in neonatal intensive care. Correspondence to Elizabeth A. Catlin, ecatlin@partners.org.     

Death and the “life review” in Halakhah

Coping with old age involves resolving the task of integrity versus despair, which demands a nondefensive confrontation with the inevitability of death. Halakhah (Jewish ethics) also considered this task critical in later years of life, spoke of death's inevitability, and attempted to discourage denial of death. The Jewish approach seems compatible with Butler's concept of life review as a reconciliation with death and a reintegration of one's identity that occurs throughout later years. While the Eriksonian goal is confronting old age with a certain capacity for wisdom, the rabbis maintained that such wisdom must culminate in the creative act of repentance.     

Light at the End of the Tunnel? Philosophy of Religion and the Near Death Experience

This article argues that currently many aspects of the Near Death Experience (NDE) remain a mystery, even after the more than two decades of discussion and analysis triggered by the publication of Raymond Moody's ground‐breaking study, Life After Life in 1975. It suggests that one reason for this continuing mystery is connected to the current under‐representation of studies of the phenomenon from within philosophy generally, and philosophy of religion in particular. It questions why this under‐representation should exist, suggesting that the very complexity of the NDE demands a thoroughgoing philosophical analysis, and arguing that philosophy and philosophy of religion have a crucial and rightful role alongside other disciplines within any attempt to gain a total understanding of what NDEs, in essence, are.     

What Makes Politicians “Religious”? How Identity Congruence Shapes Religious Evaluations

How do Americans evaluate politicians’ religiosity? We theorize extra-religious “identity congruence,” the perceived correspondence between others’ group identities and our own, will powerfully shape evaluations. We test this expectation using data from two large, nationally representative surveys that ask Americans to rate the religiosity of prominent politicians. Consistent with our theory, the strongest predictors of how Americans rate politicians’ religiosity are their congruence on party identification and ideological identity as well as expected alignments with racial identity and Christian nationalism. Respondents’ religious characteristics are relatively weak predictors. And these trends hold regardless of Americans’ knowledge of leaders’ professed religious identity. Patterns are consistent with our theory even when we split samples by party. When we compare ratings between politicians who are widely regarded as irreligious to those who are regarded as conventionally religious, partisan congruence and racial identity largely mitigate the religious advantage of the latter. Racial identity also moderates congruence on key factors. Finally, identity congruence on party, ideology, and Christian nationalism follows expected patterns even among secular Americans for whom “religious” less intuitively implies “my group.” In a time of growing identity-alignment along partisan, ideological, racial, and religious lines, extra-religious “identity congruence” powerfully shapes how Americans evaluate politicians’ religiosity.     

Varieties of Religious and Pornographic Experience: Latent Growth in Adolescents’ Religiosity and Pornography Use

The relationship between adolescent religiosity and pornography use has been longitudinally tested only in the United States. Given the social relevance of hypothesized mechanisms underlying the association, this study offers a three-wave longitudinal assessment of parallel latent growth in the two constructs carried out in a Southern European country. Using responses of 1,041 Croatian adolescents from the capital city (M_age = 16.14 years, SD = .45; 64.6% of female students) and latent growth curve modeling approach, we explored links between individual trajectories of change in religiosity and pornography use over a period of 24 months. In the observed period, religiosity decreased and pornography use increased among both male and female adolescents, but their dynamics were independent of each other—pointing to other (unmeasured) processes responsible for both adolescents’ sexualization and secularization. Important to note, the findings also pointed to an important role of age at first exposure to pornography for its frequency of use in middle to late adolescence.     

Christianity and the Death Instinct: Perfect Together?

This article is a fictional letter. This “letter” is the fourth fictional letter published by the author. In each letter, I take on a different persona and address issues and questions of theological students at Princeton Seminary, all of whom I imagine to be in their early or mid-twenties, because that is when I attended Princeton Seminary (Carlin 2004, 2006a, 2006b). By doing so, I am endorsing the introspective method in the psychology of religion, which I’ve learned from Donald Capps (1997). This letter is also a reflection on a passage found in the work Erik Eriksons (1962), which is the below epigram. In this letter, a seminarian writes to his mother during his second year of seminary, shortly before Thanksgiving break. The purpose of his letter is to inform his mother—from whom he received his Christianity—about some of his latest thoughts, particularly about the doctrine of the atonement. He has come to believe that the doctrine is problematic for society and he seeks a way to (re)make Christianity into a force for good. Perhaps strangely, he concludes by calling for the death of God, apparently oblivious to this forgotten debate in theological circles. This article raises a number of questions, but perhaps most importantly this one: How far can we take the lament?     

Research Trails and the Creative Spirit: Can Historical Case Studies Integrate the Short and Long Timescales of Creative Activity?

In the study of scientific creativity, the purposes of cognitive scientists and of historians of science overlap but are far from congruent. Historical cases are only one of many forms of evidence that cognitive scientists bring together to arrive at general conclusions about the creative processes. Historians seek to reconstruct the investigative enterprises of particular scientists. Generalizations about creativity are useful to historians mainly as one of various means to interpret the work of those particular scientists. This article presents the argument that the extent to which these two goals can be complementary depends largely (a) on how large the gap is between the duration of the thought processes that cognitive scientists examine and the limits of resolution to which historians can penetrate in following the temporal progression of a subject's thought and work and (b) on the level of temporal organization of these thoughts and actions most revealing of their creative nature.     

Forever Young: Pastoral Care and the Experience of “Aging,” Reconsidered

As we age, we inevitably experience diminishment in our physical functioning yet this need not yield a diminished sense of self. Our personal interior life and our ability to find grace in the midst of challenges are not adequately defined by the psychological, medical, or theological understandings of aging that we have inherited. Rather, there is positive potential in aging, particularly if we hone our adaptive coping skills. Pastoral care providers can facilitate enrichment of individuals’ and faith communities’ capacity for adaptive coping and ability to view the aging process as filled with new adventures of grace.     

Religious Organizations and Government: An Ecclesial Lutheran “Take”

Sharp debates exist today about the appropriate relationship between religious organizations and government, with views ranging from Christian nationalism to strict secularists. This essay explores a mediating position expressed in the conceptual phrase that religious bodies should “work with civil authorities in areas of mutual endeavor, maintaining institutional separation and functional interaction.” The essay uses historical and ecclesial sources to describe the struggles and underpinnings that lead to this position and then unpacks its meaning and import. While originating from within the conceptual and ecclesial American Lutheran tradition, the essay points to this approach as a public proposal for sound relationship between religious communities and political authority in the United States.     

“Not at All Religious”: Irreligiosity as Social Deviance in a Majority Muslim Context

In a majority Muslim context, where most college students are raised religiously and appear outwardly to conform to social norms in terms of dress and religious ritual, which college students are most likely to report that, in fact, they consider themselves “Not At All Religious”? When irreligiosity is treated as a measure of social deviance, does Hirschi’s theory of social control appropriately account for this demographic? I use original Islamic Social Attitudes Survey data collected from 1,139 Kuwaiti college students in 2007 to show that gender, being raised religiously, and religious experience are all significantly correlated to irreligiosity. Neither family attachment nor peer networks predicts self-reported irreligiosity like the influence of conservative Mosque Networks.