Understanding Religious Experience

Understanding Religious Experience PDF Author: Peter Connolly
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN: 9781781797334
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
explores fundamental questions about religious experiences such as what makes such experiences 'religious, ' are some religious experiences are more 'authentic' than others and whether these experiences provide insights into otherwise inaccessible regions of reality or are products of the brains of those who have them

Understanding Religious Experience

Understanding Religious Experience PDF Author: Peter Connolly
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN: 9781781797334
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
explores fundamental questions about religious experiences such as what makes such experiences 'religious, ' are some religious experiences are more 'authentic' than others and whether these experiences provide insights into otherwise inaccessible regions of reality or are products of the brains of those who have them

Understanding Religious Experience

Understanding Religious Experience PDF Author: Paul K. Moser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108471420
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Offers a new approach to religious experience and the kind of evidence it provides. Understanding Religious Experience will benefit those interested in the nature of religion and can be used in relevant courses in religious studies, philosophy, theology, Biblical studies, and the history of religion.

Religious Experience

Religious Experience PDF Author: Wayne Proudfoot
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520908503
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
How is religious experience to be identified, described, analyzed and explained? Is it independent of concepts, beliefs, and practices? How can we account for its authority? Under what conditions might a person identify his or her experience as religious? Wayne Proudfoot shows that concepts, beliefs, and linguistic practices are presupposed by the rules governing this identification of an experience as religious. Some of these characteristics can be understood by attending to the conditions of experience, among which are beliefs about how experience is to be explained.

The Significance of Religious Experience

The Significance of Religious Experience PDF Author: Howard Wettstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190226757
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In this volume of essays, Howard Wettstein explores the foundations of religious commitment. His orientation is broadly naturalistic, but not in the mode of reductionism or eliminativism. This collection explores questions of broad religious interest, but does so through a focus on the author's religious tradition, Judaism. Among the issues explored are the nature and role of awe, ritual, doctrine, religious experience; the distinction between belief and faith; problems of evil and suffering with special attention to the Book of Job and to the Akedah, the biblical story of the binding of Isaac; the virtue of forgiveness. One of the book's highlights is its literary (as opposed to philosophical) approach to theology that at the same time makes room for philosophical exploration of religion. Another is Wettstein's rejection of the usual picture that sees religious life as sitting atop a distinctive metaphysical foundation, one that stands in need of epistemological justification.

The Neuroscience of Religious Experience

The Neuroscience of Religious Experience PDF Author: Patrick McNamara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139483560
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Technical advances in the life and medical sciences have revolutionised our understanding of the brain, while the emerging disciplines of social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience continue to reveal the connections of the higher cognitive functions and emotional states associated with religious experience to underlying brain states. At the same time, a host of developing theories in psychology and anthropology posit evolutionary explanations for the ubiquity and persistence of religious beliefs and the reports of religious experiences across human cultures, while gesturing toward physical bases for these behaviours. What is missing from this literature is a strong voice speaking to these behavioural and social scientists - as well as to the intellectually curious in the religious studies community - from the perspective of a brain scientist.

Religious Experience Reconsidered

Religious Experience Reconsidered PDF Author: Ann Taves
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069114088X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Annotation Ann Taves addresses the subject of religious experience directly and the problems of reductionism and humanistic fears of the sciences indirectly and by example. The orientation of this book is practical more than philosophical.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience PDF Author: William James
Publisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1877527467
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 824

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Book Description
Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

Understanding Religious Conversion

Understanding Religious Conversion PDF Author: Lewis Ray Rambo
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300065152
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Looking at a wide variety of religions, this work offers an exploration of religious conversion. The phenomena is approached from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, theology and anthropology.

Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience

Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience PDF Author: William W. Meissner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300037517
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In this provocative book, W. W. Meissner, a Jesuit and psychoanalyst, attempts to bring about a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and religious thinking. Utilizing the resources of modern psychoanalytic insight, he examines Freud's views on religion, explores the dialectical relationship between psychoanalysis and religion, and applies more contemporary concepts in psychoanalysis to the understanding of religious experience. Dr. Meissner has written a book which is consistently interesting, often challenging, and impressive for its wide range of scholarship in two fields not often combined in the same work...Dr. Meissner has done us a service in this scholarly work by demonstrating how two perspectives of the human condition have over the course of the last several decades come to similar conclusions.-Otto F. Thaler, M.D., Journal of the American Academy of Religion A rich and stimulating book addressing important issues that lie at the intersection of psychoanalysis and religion.-Paul C. Vitz, Contemporary Psychology Meissner has made a challenging useful contribution that will be pondered, applied, and debated.It will undoubtedly also achieve the goal of bringing about more understanding between analysts and theologians.-Lowell Rubin, M.D., Newsletter, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

Understanding Religious Experiences

Understanding Religious Experiences PDF Author: J. Harold Ellens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0275995488
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Today most people feel less interested in religion and more interested in spirituality. If you ask what they mean, they will tell you that organized religion tends to turn them off, but, nonetheless, they feel a hunger in the heart that they cannot seem to fill. They do not mean that they would rather have disorganized religion; they mean that institutional religion does not seem to satisfy their spirits and feel there must be something more, some better way of experiencing whatever that is for which they are hungry. Much new experimentation is going on as a result. Some of it is a search for the meaning to fill the soul and satisfy the spirit; much of it is a search for meaning on the spiritual level itself. Spirituality reaches always toward the question about the meaning of God, the meaning of relationships with others, the meaning of intimacy, and the meaning of soul gratifying insights into truth. Here, Ellens carefully and sensitively explores the full range of our spiritual natures and the variety of spiritual experiences of which we are capable, describing the way our souls and psyches work in our hunger and thirst for meaning. He explains in an enlightening and unconventional way why and how every human desires to reflect upon, learn, and share a heartfelt experience of God and of others. Readers will find in this book a description of the meaning of the biblical stories about spiritual experiences in addition to descriptions of the kinds of spiritual experiences that ordinary people are having, how they are achieving them, and the ways in which they are filling their lives with meaning that goes beyond the horizons of material life. The author paints this picture in such a way as to let us in on what biblically based authentic spirituality and spiritual experience really is, and why it may or may not necessarily have anything to do with traditional institutionalized religion. He carefully and vividly explains the notion of spirituality as it is illustrated in the Bible and discusses spiritual experiences such as prayer, epiphany, visions, and other experiences. He considers whether spirituality is mainly a connection with God, with others, or with both. Readers hoping to get a better sense of what it means to be spiritual will have many of their questions answered in these pages.