Religious Experience Reconsidered

A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things

By: Ann Taves

Narrated by: Nikki James

The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, phychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from the social and natural sciences. Religious Experience Reconsidered lays out a framework for research into religious phenomena that reclaims experience as a central concept while bridging the divide between religious studies and the sciences.Ann Taves shifts the focus from "religious experience," conceived as a fixed and stable thing, to an examination of the processes by which people attribute the meaning to their experiences. She proposes a new approach that unites the study of religion with fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better understand how these processes are incorporated into the broader cultural formations we think of as religious or spiritual. Taves addresses a series of key questions: how can we set up studies without obscuring contestations over meaning and value? What is the relationship between experience and consciousness? How can research into consciousness help us access and interpret the experiences of others? Why do people individually or collectively explain their experiences in religious terms? How can we set up studies that allow us to compare experiences across time and cultures?

Religious Experience Reconsidered demonstrates how methods from the sciences can be combined with those from the humanities to advance a naturalistic understanding of the experiences that people deem religious. The book is published by Princeton University Press.

©2009 Princeton University Press (P)2011 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Ann Taves's ambition in this lucid, elegantly structured, and prodigiously researched work is to render transparent the cultural, sociological, and psychological processes by which certain experiences are deemed religious - and she succeeds admirably...Historians, anthropologists, and psychologists of religion will find this a stimulating and generative work, a helpful conversation partner in their own researches." (Robert A. Orsi, author of Between Heaven and Earth)

Probably written for the experts, can't tell.

Unless you are writing a thesis on religion don't bother with this title. It begins drowning you in several meters of jargon and unless you have a thesaurus as a nearby life raft and an excessive amount of time for minutia don't this title isn't worth reading.