The Rothko Chapel Paintings and the ‘urgency of the transcendent experience’

Since the Romantic period, painters have no longer made use of traditional Christian iconography to express religious transcendence. Taking their cue from Schleiermacher’s Reden Über die Religion, painters have sought for new, personal ways to express religious transcendence. One example is Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea. Rosenblum argues, in his Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, that there is a parallel between Friedrich and the abstract expressionist Rothko with respect to the expression to religious transcendence. In this article I investigate how the experience of transcendence that Rothko’s paintings want to evoke is to be described. Is it an experience of the sublime in the Romantic tradition? Is it the evocation of the ultimate in accordance with Tillich’s broad concept of religion? Does it display affinity between Rothko and the first generation of abstract painters such as Kandinsky and Malevich? Or is it a transcendent experience that cannot be situated so easily within the options supplied? After determining Rothko’s understanding of transcendence, some issues will be brought up that could be fruitful for Christian theology.     

“A Part of Who I Am”: Material Objects as “Plot Devices” in the Formation of Religious Selves

What role do material objects play in the formation of religious subjects? Drawing from an ethnographic investigation of the evolving relationships between a group of Eastern Orthodox converts and their religious icons, this article develops a theoretical approach to this question that conceptualizes material artifacts as “plot devices” in the formation of religious identity narratives. Integrating insights from studies of material religious culture with narrative theories of identity, this article argues that religious artifacts become significant to religious identity construction to the extent they act as resources for the configuration of a narrative structure in which transcendent or sacred others play a part. As the empirical details of this study demonstrate, attending to how religious objects’ symbolic meanings (i.e., who or what they represent) are mediated by their unique material characteristics (how they make meanings physically present to social actors in embodied social interaction) is of vital importance for explaining the significant role material artifacts play in the religious emplotment of action and experience.     

Accommodating religion to modern neuroscience

Science and religion commonly reside in either an awkward peaceful co-existence or in bitter conflict. That conflict emerges especially in college students as they acquire knowledge about physical, biological, and social sciences. Most college students bring their shallow childhood religious instruction to their college classes. Neuroscience can help students realise how their religious views are affected by their biology, conditioning, experiences, culture, education, emotions, and cognitive processes. In turn, religion can provide world views that challenge neuroscience and remind us of how much remains unknown and may even be unknowable. This report summarises the author’s three semesters’ experience of teaching an upper-division undergraduate essay and discussion course in which students discover how neuroscience and religion inform each other.     

A Review of Carolyn Chen’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience</Emphasis>

Becoming religious among immigrants to the U.S. is undoubtedly a complex transformation. It takes place with both external sociocultural conditions and internal spiritual and psychological volitions. While marveling at Carolyn Chen’s fine scholarship on Taiwanese immigrants’ conversion experience, this review offers a critical reading of Chen’s equation: becoming American = becoming religious or vice versa with the reviewer’s own experience as both an Asian immigrant and a cultural anthropologist. It also discusses Chen’s assessment of the gendered identity of both Asian-American men and women, be it religious, cultural, or political.     

Intelligibility,Moral Loss and Injustice

In Liberalism's Religion, I analyse the specific conception of religion that liberalism relies upon. I argue that the concept of religion should be disaggregated into its normatively salient features. When deciding whether to avert undue impingements on religious observances, or to avoid any untoward support of such observances, liberal states should not deal with ‘religion’ as such but, rather, with relevant dimensions of religious phenomena. States should avoid religious entanglement when ‘religion’ is epistemically inaccessible, socially divisive and/or comprehensive in scope. In turn, states should show special deference to religious observances insofar as they exhibit what I call integrity – whether personal or collective. The upshot of this interpretive strategy is that liberal law need not recognise religion as such. As a result, there are gaps between the liberal construal of disaggregated religion and the lived experience of religion as a uniquely integrated experience. Are these gaps morally regrettable? Are they unjust?     

Visions as ‘Good to Think’: A Cognitive Approach to Visionary Experience in Islamic Sufi Thought

This article explores one type of visionary experience described and interpreted by mystics within certain traditions, which may be termed a ‘cognitive’ or ‘gnostic’ vision. Such visions provide information or offer solutions to problems of theology or religious interpretation.

A close textual analysis of a selection from the writings of an eighteenth century Indian Sufi, Shāh Wal? Allāh of Delhi, demonstrates this process of intensive thinking through superimposed grids which combine elements of religious symbol systems. This type of thinking triggers a mystical experience which is subsequently interpreted in a problem solving or divinatory mode.     

On the use of the uncanny in ritual

In ‘The Future of an Illusion’, Freud suggested that religion allows a person to ‘feel at home in the uncanny’ – that unsettling interplay of suppression and memory that arises from living subject to fears and anxieties in an unpredictable world. Here, the author examines a ritual called the ‘Wild Hunt’ that occurred during her ethnographic research among contemporary Pagans to explore how uncanny encounters within religious rituals can help participants come to terms with fears and anxieties, transforming inchoate emotions stemming from trauma or dislocation. Following Otto, the author suggests that such a sense of the uncanny can be central to the power of religious ritual. These uncanny elements within religious ritual provide an illustration of how religious experiences can help participants to feel ‘at home in the uncanny’, thereby bringing together the seemingly disparate accounts of Otto and Freud on the relationship between religion and uncanny experience.     

Religious Commitment,Skepticism, and Struggle Among U.S. College Students: The Impact of Majority/Minority Religious Affiliation and Institutional Type

Using a longitudinal sample of over 14,000 undergraduate students, this study explores whether and how students’ religious transformations during the college years are associated with their religious affiliation, religious experiences, and the institutional characteristics of their college or university. Hierarchical linear modeling reveals that students from religious majority groups (i.e., mainline and evangelical Protestants) generally experience increased religious commitment and decreased religious skepticism as compared with students from religious minority groups. Interestingly, though, students from these majority groups also report greater levels of religious struggle compared to minority group students. Moreover, institutional religious affiliation and an inclusive campus religious climate often attenuate the relationship between students’ religious affiliation and their religious transformation. Environments at both the macro (campus) and micro (friendship groups) levels contribute critically to young adults’ religious commitment.     

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.     

Religion,Truth and Religious Education

The main questions discussed are (1) what we are to count as ‘religion’, and what kind of propositions are central to religious belief, and (2) in particular, how can religious belief be sustained without a superstitious belief in the supernatural? R.M. Hare's views are first examined, and in part rejected: religious belief involves more than ‘commitment’, and is primarily concerned to assert that certain features of the world are worthy of worship. We need to consider how such assertions may be verified or falsified.     

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.     

Mysterium Tremendum

In recent years, interest in the scientific basis of religious experience has resurged. In particular, research and publications by V. S. Ramachandran and by Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg have sparked considerable curiosity and debate over the reality and basis of religious experience. This article puts such research into a broader context and examines the extent to which scientific research supports or undermines particular religious and theological claims. I argue that such experiments show that religious experience has some biological basis and is not simply a product of cultural suggestion. At the same time, such experiences are not completely self–interpreting, so that cultural context, including theological claims, are needed to make sense of such experiences. By itself, scientific research does not prove or disprove the reality of religious experiences generally, but it does shape how we think of the possibilities and interpretations of such experiences.     

Exegesis,Postmodernism, and Auschwitz 1

Based on material consisting of interviews, we ask how this material sheds light on religion's performance regarding moral competence. Four questions structure the study: Firstly, how do informants articulate moral insights and reasons for actions, practices or personal ideals in religious terms? Secondly, how do they articulate and express religious beliefs in moral terms? Thirdly we discuss theoretically how these ways of articulating moral insights in religious terms, and vice versa, can be linked to the notion of moral competence, and as a possible indication of “religion's performance outside itself”. Finally, we ask how the connection between religion and moral competence identified through the discussion in the third point can be further interpreted in light of the informants’ perceptions of religious contexts and communities where they locate themselves and with which they identify. This provides a more nuanced understanding of how contextual embeddedness conditions moral competence, and the potential performance of religion in that respect.     

I Know That my Redeemer Lives: Relational Perspectives on Trauma, Dissociation, and Faith

This paper focuses the lens of multiplicity on patients’ religious experience in relation to the psychic realities of early or pervasive trauma, where dissociation is not just a normal means of self-regulation, but becomes an entrenched structuring mechanism through which the trauma survivor experiences every relationship, including any relationship to God. What might God or faith look like from the perspective of the traumatized self? This paper considers issues of multiplicity and dissociation as they affect the processing of religious or spiritual experience, with a few brief clinical illustrations, and offers a reading of the biblical book of Job as a metaphor for the inner world of the survivor of early trauma.     

Corpus Mysticum and Religious Experience: Henry,Lacoste and Marion

While usually denoting the church and/or the sacrament of the Eucharist, the ‘mystical body of Christ’ has become a theological grammar for Catholic phenomenologists Michel Henry, Jean‐Yves Lacoste and Jean‐Luc Marion to think through the possibility of religious experience. This article traces out some of the richly detailed accounts of religious experience proffered by Henry, Lacoste and Marion, paying heed to how they narrate the non‐worldly, invisible disclosure of that religious experiencing. The final section outlines a deeper integration of the three by highlighting the need for an encounter with Christ to be both non‐worldly and worldly, between presence and absence, and thus an experience that is concrete, lived, but also mediated by the visible church.     

ʿAbdolkarim Soroush’s Approach to ‘Experience’ as a Basis for His Reform Project

During the past few decades, many Muslim scholars and reformers have established new principles of reform through various hermeneutical approaches towards primary sources of Islam. Thus, Islamic thought, like any other religious tradition, has undergone a process of development in the modern period and will surely continue to do so in the future. ?Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945) is undoubtedly one of the most influential religious reformers in contemporary Iran and he has gained an international reputation. One of the central ideas that consistently appear throughout Soroush’s writings is that religion can be linked to a type of human ‘experience’, a theme that has long been the concern of Western scholars of religion. This article argues that the theme of experience became the fundamental element in two aspects of Soroush’s reform project, namely his approach to qur’anic rulings and his philosophy of religious pluralism. Indeed, the article shows that Soroush’s conception of revelation as a religious experience of the Prophet Muhammad is not only confined to a theological depiction of God’s relation to humanity, but also has legal and social implications for approaching Islam in the context of the present time.     

Negotiating faith on the Coventry Road: British-Muslim youth identities in the ‘third space’

This article, which arises from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, explores the negotiation of faith, place and social identity amongst British-Muslim youth in one inner-city community in Birmingham, UK. Narratives drawn from fieldwork are brought into a critical dialogue with theoretical discourse about the nature of culture, the built urban environment, youth identities and contextualised religious discourse within the British-Muslim community. The article suggests that a dynamic definition of culture as an open and ongoing process of meaning-making and the utilisation of ‘third space’ thinking are needed to adequately explore the multifaceted contextual religious discourse of British-Muslim youth. The article seeks to answer a key question: how do urban British-Muslim youth negotiate faith and meaning in a society that increasingly questions their presence and what might their experience have to teach wider society about the impact that contemporary urbanism has on the articulation of personal, political and religious identity?     

Innovative ordinariness and ritual change in a Jerusalem Minyan

In this article, I present an ethnographic analysis of ritual change in the communal prayers of a Jerusalem congregation that promotes gender equality within the framework of Orthodox-oriented halakha. While scholars have examined how ritual change in Jewish communities develops through the reinterpretation and reutilization of religious texts, practices and objects, my fieldwork reveals how change is shaped by people’s habitus – their ways of being in the world. Communal prayers in this congregation exemplify what I call an “innovative ordinariness” of religious change. Members view and experience their communal rituals as “ordinary” due to their perception of their prayer hall as a familiar spatial and auditory environment. This ordinariness facilitates creative and innovative uses of religious practices. The data outlined here are based on field research during which I participated in the congregation’s services and communal activities, and held interviews and informal conversations with members. This case study depicts ways in which members of Israeli Orthodox society apply their cultural toolkit to create religious spaces that accommodate their gender-egalitarian values, beliefs and lifestyles and, at the same time, produce religiosity that is experienced and understood as legitimate. By doing so, I argue, they assign new meanings to traditional Orthodox categories.     

Filling a data gap: the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) series

Abstract

The last US government survey that collected information on religious identification was in 1957. Since then researchers have relied solely on non-governmental data sources, primarily the General Social Survey. This paper shows how the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) series has deepened understanding of religious identification in the past two decades with its large samples (113?713 in 1990, 50?280 in 2001, and 54?461 in 2008) and its unique open-ended religion question. Giving respondents a chance to name their own religion, if any, allows researchers to identify and study small religious groups, which are placed together under ‘other’ in typical national studies. By using a consistent research methodology, the ARIS surveys form a time-series that enable tracking trends. The paper describes two case studies: how the ARIS series documented the rise of the Nones and how it tracked shifts in religious identification among American Latinos.     

DSM-5: The intersectionality of spirituality,culture, and aging

Counselors practice with older adults whose religion and spirituality may be factors in assessment and treatment. The DSM-5 includes religion and spirituality as part of pathology or culture. This approach is supported in counselor education. Religion as a cultural derivative only reflects the human aspect of religion, not including a client’s perception of divine actions possibly beyond the human experience, i.e., a miracle. How does the clinician discern if a client’s experience reflects pathology or the possibility of some sort of miracle? This article includes strengths and limitations of a cultural definition of religious and spiritual experience with case applications.