Attribution and building blocks: Comment on Ann Taves's Religious Experience Reconsidered

Taves nicely elaborates an attribution approach to the study of religious experience, clarifying the issues it raises and providing some guides for further research. This comment addresses two of those issues, (1) the relation of top-down and bottom-up accounts of religious experiences and (2) what Taves describes as the building block approach to their study.     

Ann Taves's Religious Experience Reconsidered is a sign of a global apocalypse that will kill us all

According to Ann Taves, many humanist scholars of religion are afraid of science. In particular, they object to scientific reductionism because reductive explanations violate taboos that prohibit reducing religion to something else. This essay will analyze how Taves and other proponents of cognitive approaches to religious studies fashion a kind of secular praxis in which breaking taboos is a crucial attribute of scholarly integrity and intellectual heroism. I will argue that this equation between reason and profanation reproduces the discursive logic that legitimates the global expansion of a constellation of overlapping secular scientific, economic, political, and religious institutions.     

Attribution of Religious Commitment: Differences Between the Religious and the Nonreligious

Abstract

Investigators of linguistic devices such as minimal responses have assumed their function, neglecting to examine the matter empirically. This study introduces a technique enabling the identification of the function of such responses. With stereophonic recordings of conversation between two people, it was possible to delete minimal responses from an original recording. Eighty British students heard either an original recording or an edited version in which minimal responses had been deleted and were asked to make judgments about various aspects of the interaction. Results indicate minimal responses served to denote agreement and to suggest a context of informality.     

Religious Experience Reconsidered as an example of theoretical assertiveness in the study of religion

The publication of Religious Experience Reconsidered is one more indication that the incoherent mixture of coyness and braggadocio that for decades has characterized the study of religion and other disciplines, is finally giving way to honest theoretical assertiveness. Taves' book is a careful treatment of experience deemed religious that manages to do justice to the recurrent features of what people tend to experience in such contexts, while also taking into consideration the culture-bound components of those experiences. What is especially welcome is that instead of seeking to establish a bland middle ground, she has pursued an independent path, making use of scholarship in a variety of disciplines, especially psychology of religion.     

Varieties of Religious Experience:Continuity and Change in Religious Involvement

ABSTRACT The intent of the present study was to determine whether the selective aggregation of background data subgroups could be used to identify and control for differences across persons in the meaning of religious involvement. After background data subgroups had been clustered based on similarity in the variables related to religious involvement, two clusters were identified. One cluster contained individuals whose religious involvement was characterized by a functional, instrumental orientation, while the other was composed of individuals whose religious involvement was characterized by an affective, expressive orientation. Subsequently, causal models intended to describe continuity and change in religious involvement were constructed using individuals assigned to each cluster. It was found that different models were required to describe continuity and change in religious involvement in the instrumental and expressive clusters.     

Metaphor,Religious Language,and Religious Experience

Is it possible to talk about God without either misrepresentation or failing to assert anything of significance? The article begins by reviewing how, in attempting to answer this question, traditional theories of religious language have failed to sidestep both potential pitfalls adequately. After arguing that recently developed theories of metaphor seem better able to shed light on the nature of religious language, it considers the claim that huge areas of our language and, consequently, of our experience are shaped by metaphors. Finally, it considers some of the more significant implications of this claim for our understanding of both religious language and religious experience.     

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.     

Transformational Analysis and Religious Experience

Journal of Religion and Health - The therapeutic process, which taps into the individual’s most vulnerable inner experience, can always reach a radical reversal of one’s perception of...     

Religious Experience,Religious Worldviews,and Near-Death Studies

The tense relation prevailing between representatives of conservative religion and other near-death researchers may be illumined by a look at the different functions religion has fulfilled in the past. Religion may be seen as centering on the meaningfulness of the world, on spiritual experience, or on salvation. In this essay, I sketch the place of these themes in the Great Religions. These themes have inherent mutual tensions that in the case of Christianity cannot necessarily be settled by appeal to the Bible, because different Christian groups have somewhat differing views of the source of authority. Furthermore, the Bible's authority is challenged by the results of modern scholarship. In light of these reflections, I see Michael Sabom's Light & Death (1998) as showing valuable data and insights but failing to respond to significant challenges.     

Religious experience and public cult: The case of Mary Ann Van Hoof

This study focuses on the first year (1950) of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary reported by Mary Ann Van Hoof of Necedah, Wisconsin. It argues that Van Hoof's experiences met not simply the needs of the community-at-large, but also helped the seer draw meaning from an emotionally-deprived and abusive childhood. The study concludes by suggesting that public serial apparitions are complex events that should be examined for the light they shed on the interaction between the seer's personal characteristics and experiences and the public events that take shape around those experiences.Support for this article was provided by the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas.     

Ambivalence and Male Religious Experience: An Autobiographical Study

I argue that what are typically identified as “calls from God” to an office of sacred power are filled with various degrees and types of ambivalence. This ambivalence becomes manifest (or not) to the person experiencing a call at various points in their lifespan and it exists for a number of reasons. I seek to unveil the psychodynamics responsible for these feelings of ambivalence. I argue that the awareness of feelings of ambivalence can be correlated with the degree of one’s happiness—specifically in one’s sexual and mental health; this point is marshaled throughout the essay by autobiographical examples of men who experienced some type of divine calling. In addition to psychoanalytic resources, I apply postmodern autobiographical criticism to this autobiographical study; my autobiographical notes are written in italics.     

宗教体验及其神经基础的研究

宗教体验是人在宗教活动中的心态或体悟及伴随的情感体验,它是一个过程.其神经基础的研究表明,宗教体验过程中大脑的某些特定区域被激活.这些研究表明宗教体验与认知和情绪有关,在一定程度上与早期有关宗教体验实质的结论吻合,但这并不表明大脑中存在"上帝脑区".该文简要介绍了宗教体验的概念、神经基础的一些研究,并对该领域内的一些问题做出了说明.     

PERMA and the building blocks of well-being

Seligman (2011) hypothesized that PERMA (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment) are the elements of well-being. Goodman, Disabato, Kashdan & Kaufmann (2017) reported strong evidence that subjective well-being is the final common path of such elements and their data are entirely consistent with Seligman’s hypothesis. They argued, incorrectly however, that he suggested that PERMA constituted a different kind of well-being rather than just its building blocks. The complicated issue, one that transcends psychometrics, of how to decide on elements of well-being is discussed.