Emotions: Here and Now,Then and There

Religions difer not only in the creeds they espouse, but also in the kinds of emotions they inspire. Any discussion of the relation between religion and emotion must therefore be incomplete and misrepresentative of some views. In this short commentary, I focus on two areas of potential controversy that I believe would profit from further discussion and debate. The first involves the truth or authenticity of emotional experience; the second concerns the possibility of disembodied emotional states. Although both issues are presented in the context of religious beliefs, their theoretical and practical implications are not specifically religious; rather, they concern first the dialectical relation between social institutions and emotional syndromes and second, the relation between emotion and cognition.