Spirituality and Religious Experience

L'article envisage d'abord la forme chrétienne de l’expérience d’Anselme à partir de textes qui exposent quelques attitudes de vie telles que l’amitié et l’acceptation de l’épiscopat. Il aborde ensuite la structure de la pensée d'Anselme en lien avec cette manière de vivre une expérience de Dieu.

The temples of the Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) in Brazil and across the world are intended as 'spiritual emergency units' where mediums and their spirit guides provide patients with free assistance for health, relational, spiritual, and material matters concerning the person’s wellbeing. The therapeutic practice is known as 'disobsessive healing' and involves the release of causal spiritual agents considered to be affecting the person’s wellbeing. This paper discusses the Vale do Amanhecer’s etiology of illness and how mediums understand disobsessive healing as a complementary epistemology of healing, discerning spiritual and pathological experiences. Then, it examines how patients may draw their therapeutic trajectories across biomedical and spiritual contexts, sometimes developing mediumship as part of their therapeutic process. Approaching these therapeutic practices from the standpoint of affect and bodily experience may undermine the prominence of 'belief' in the study of non-biomedical approaches to healing, shedding light upon the relational, embodied, and lived-through dimensions of the notions involved in the therapeutic process.

This paper is a preliminary report on the results of an informal survey tentatively exploring the connections between the practice of Permaculture and extraordinary experiences. It will introduce Permaculture, give an overview of the questions posed in the survey, examine some of the responses received and speculate on possible frameworks for understanding the connection. It is intended to be an exploratory study and to encourage further research into the connections between extraordinary experience and practical ecology.

THE SEARCH FOR A DIVINELY GUIDED LIFE is a first-person true account of one individual's quest for the Divine through time and memory, across many cultures and traditions, through dark nights, gentle graces, and unimaginable miracles and wonders, ultimately leading to the discovery of the one path within the many and the heart of divine wisdom and guidance itself.

That trauma can play a significant role in the onset and maintenance of voice-hearing is one of the most striking and important developments in the recent study of psychosis. Yet the finding that trauma increases the risk for hallucination and for psychosis is quite different from the claim that trauma is necessary for either to occur. Trauma is often but not always associated with voice-hearing in populations with psychosis; voice-hearing is sometimes associated with willful training and cultivation in nonclinical populations. This article uses ethno- graphic data among other data to explore the possibility of multiple pathways to voice-hearing for clinical and nonclinical individuals whose voices are not due to known etiological fac- tors such as drugs, sensory deprivation, epilepsy, and so forth. We suggest that trauma sometimes plays a major role in hal- lucinations, sometimes a minor role, and sometimes no role at all. Our work also finds seemingly distinct phenomenological patterns for voice-hearing, which may reflect the different sali- ence of trauma for those who hear voices.

The proofs of God's existence have had an adventurous history and have evolved over time; but few can be found that have made many innovations and, based on historical discussions in this field, have been able to give a good insight into the validity or discretion of historical arguments. Ayatollah Javadi Amoli has shown all these philosophical innovations in the valuable book "Explaining the Proofs of God's existence" and their other books. This paper intends to examine their powerful philosophical views, which are full of accuracy and innovation. These views are not just about the proofs of God's existence, but reflect their philosophical dedication in Western philosophy and the ability of Islamic philosophy in this field. In this article, various philosophical gestures are shown.

براهین اثبات خداوند تاریخ پر ماجرایی داشته است و به مرور تطور پیدا کرده است. اما کمتر کسی را می توان یافت که در
آن نوآوری های بسیاری داشته باشد و با تکیه بر بحثهای تاریخی در این زمینه توانسته باشد بخوبی دیدگاههای بدیعی را درباره اعتبار یا بی اعتباری برهانهای تاریخی داشته باشد. اما آیت الله جوادی آملی در کتاب ارزشمند تبیین براهین اثبات خدا و سایر کتابهایشان تمامی این نوآوری های فلسفی را نشان داده اند. در این مقاله درنظر است این دیدگاههای قدرتمند فلسفی ایشان که مشحون از دقت و نوآوری است نشان داده شود. این دیدگاههای ایشان فقط درباره برهانهای اثبات خداوند نیست بلکه نشانگر تعمق فلسفی ایشان در فلسفه غرب و به رخ کشیدن توانایی های فلسفه اسلامی در این زمینه است. در این مقاله انواع درسهای فلسفی که می توان از دیدگاههای ایشان اخذ کرد نشان داده می شود
این مقاله در مجله حکمت اسراء سال نهم شماره اول بهار و تابستان 1396 منتشر شده است.
حکمت اسراء، مجله علمی پژوهشی بنیاد وحیانی اسراء، سال نهم، دوره ۹،شماره ۱، شماره پیاپی ۲۹ بهار و تابستان 1396، صص41-5.

The Classification and Statistical Manual of Extrasensory Experiences (CSM-EE) is a classification of extrasensory experiences (i.e. telepathy, clairvoyance, mediumship, precognition, synchronistic events, etc.) with associated criteria designed to facilitate more reliable classification. CSM-EE assists in identifying like experiences that are similar in phenomenology, but otherwise widely differ in narrative due to culture, language, and religious/spiritual belief. Whereby, the CSM-EE can assist in accurate classification and is therefore a valuable resource for clinicians and students, and a valuable reference for researchers, dealing with extrasensory experiences in a wide diversity of context. The criteria and associated phenomenological features and specifiers serve in part as a textbook for students who require a well-structured method to understand and classify extrasensory experiences as well as for experienced professionals encountering these experiences for the first time.

In my communication I examine the significations of the term πεῖρα, which can be encountered 20 times in the One Hundred Gnostic Chapters, being the key-notion in the closing considerations of four chapters (23, 24, 31, 32). The inherent intention is to show that Diadochus invests this word with an original use: it doesn’t have the usual signification of test, trial, temptation, but designates the experience acquired on different stages of climbing onto the spiritual ladder. For Plato (The Republic, Gorgias) and Aristotle (Metaphysics), it was the term ἐμπειρία which designated the experience gained through the bodily senses, leading to a kind of knowledge acquired by practice. For Diadochus, on the contrary, πεῖρα comes to represent the experience acquired through spiritual senses. It leads to knowledge of the truth, involving the ability to discern between the causes of inner sensations, ability actualized by noetic illumination. This experience accompanies the pilgrimage of the human being towards the perfection of the resemblance to God and can become manifest as initial experience of faith (ch. 23), of immaterial sense (ch. 24), of discernment between the divine and the illusionary consolation (ch. 31, 32, 33), experience of the gnostic or of the theologian (ch. 72), experience of two desolations (ch. 87), experience of God’s charity (ch. 91). The scope of my research includes also the analysis of the correlations between experience (πεῖρα) and charity (ἀγάπη), knowledge (γνῶσις) and illumination (φωτισμός).

"This essay argues that Sri Aurobindo’s unduly neglected Essays on the Gita (1916-20) develops a radically new hermeneutic approach to the Gītā, which helps account for crucial aspects of the Gītā’s philosophical and theological teachings that have baffled commentators for centuries.  Rejecting the eisegetic practice of traditional commentators such as Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja, Sri Aurobindo strives to interpret the Gītā on its own terms.  Sri Aurobindo’s key move is to foreground and reinterpret the mysterious concept of “vijñāna,” which occurs at five places in the Gītā.  In IX.1 of the Gītā, for instance, Lord Kṛṣṇa refers to the “highest secret” as “jñāna combined with vijñāna.”  By situating these two key concepts within the Gītā’s broader philosophical framework, Sri Aurobindo makes a convincing case that jñāna is the realization of the impersonal “Ātman,” the eternal non-dual “Self” common to all, while vijñāna is the still higher realization of God as the impersonal-personal “Puruṣottama,” the “Supreme Person.”  Upon the attainment of vijñāna, one realizes that the infinite God is at once the impersonal Ātman and the supreme Lord of the universe, at once immanent in the universe and transcendent to it. 

According to Sri Aurobindo, the concept of vijñāna is the hermeneutic key to understanding the Gītā’s entire thought-structure, including its complex account of the nature of God and its persistent privileging of devotion (bhakti).  Sri Aurobindo further demonstrates how vijñāna furnishes the conceptual basis for the Gītā’s unique syncretic conception of spiritual practice, which combines devotion, knowledge, and selfless action.  I conclude the essay by gesturing toward how Sri Aurobindo’s radical reinterpretation of the concept of vijñāna in the Gītā opens up exciting possibilities for interreligious dialogue and provides a fertile basis for exploring new directions in comparative theology."

This article is about the stranger reaches of extraordinary experience research. It was first published in Journal for the Study of Religious Experience, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2021).

The full issue can be downloaded here:

https://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/issue/view/9

This thesis investigates the nature and dynamics of transcendent experience: phenomena I have witnessed in many individuals, groups, and organisations. Transcendent experience is best described as an attitude or way of life that is fundamentally different to what could be construed as the ‘normal’, conventional, and rationalistic attitudes that pervade our Western epistemological mind-set today as the most—if not sole—means to valuable knowledge and experience. This thesis does not seek to explain its features dogmatically and definitively—after all, such a phenomenon evades the reductive and totalising effects of rationalisation—but assesses a vast range of supporting literature to emphasise how it is manifesting itself across an equally vast and eclectic range of peoples. By examining evidence from contemporary personal accounts, historical case study, published biographical accounts, scholarly reports and personal anecdotes, a number of key characteristics and principles of transcendence are identified as underpinning their experiences.

These principles include a commitment from the individual or group in question to embrace and practice ‘ways of knowing’ beyond rational cognition. There is a tendency for the subject to recognise themselves as involved in purposeful ways of knowing. This is seen as a recognition that the physical self is merged with a nature that is experienced by the subject as ‘transcendent’ to them; that is to say, a nature that is described as ‘divine’ or ‘spiritual’. A further principle is the subject’s openness to, and assimilation of, what is reported to be not one but multiple transcendent experiences. The benefits of these are construed to be a sense of belonging and a feeling of wellbeing—feelings, which it is claimed, could not be obtained through conventional ‘rational’ ways of knowing. In short, these people seem to be living according to, or at least intent on working towards, a transcendent way of ‘being’, one that validates non-rational, possibly ‘divine’ experiences as essentially ‘human’. Other key characteristics of transcendent experiences are ascertained, including the role of suffering and emptiness.

The aim of this research is to investigate such claims and to assess the importance, for those involved, of this ‘transcendent’ approach to life. My investigations conclude that these experiences may be on the increase, and that something akin to a ‘transcendence movement’ can be traced as operating within society, despite—and perhaps because of—the overreliance on more rational attitudes to meaning and methods for arriving at ‘truth’, which are in themselves only relatively useful for life and often detrimental to feelings of wellbeing. The movement I outline engages with a way or depth of being that transcends individual beliefs and cultural differences, and brings the person into creative contact with sources that transcend his or her own limited, individual perspectives.

Scientific and religious communities have long been at odds over scientific attempts to explain religious experience. Since the beginning of the modern era, a number of scientists interested in religion and spirituality have sought a rigorous understanding of how these types of experiences manifest themselves in the brain and in human behavior. According to this view, our deepest beliefs and most elevating experiences can be understood in scientific terms-in particular, in terms of neuroscience studying "brain anatomy, brain function, and brain chemistry" (Tiger and McGuire 2010, 113). Yet others doubt that science has a legitimate role in exploring the nature of religion or spirituality. From their perspective, scientists should not attempt to explain the ineffable at all, and they regard such efforts as a challenge to the values and experiences that they consider most personal and sacred. Aldous Huxley, one of the most prophetic science fiction authors of his generation, wrote in 1958, "That men and women can, by physical and chemical means, transcend themselves in a genuinely spiritual way… seems rather shocking. But, after all, the drug or the physical exercise is not the cause of the spiritual experience; it is only its occasion." As a seasoned explorer of the boundary between chemistry and spirituality, Huxley believed that the "chemical means" of spiritual experience do not invalidate the psychological value of the state itself. In that case, efforts to better understand those means is especially important for the scientific study of those experiences. It should be possible to undertake a scientific approach to religious and spiritual experience without reducing those experiences strictly to chemical reactions. And even if such reductionism were possible, other disciplines would likely still provide a valuable grammar for describing and understanding various aspects of religion and spirituality. At the same time, any social, cultural, or personal conception of the divine or of a higher power 277 COPYRIGHT 2017 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210

While the New Testament Christians rightly rejected the concept of deification as divinisation of the powerful, in the next generations two themes associated with deification re-emerged: the radical unity with God visible in the saints who became by grace who Christ is by nature, and the unity of love among creatures recreated through Christ-like kenosis. In my lecture I will explore more closely the content of these themes as it emerged in the spiritual advice on how to live  a life relying on God’s grace which makes us alive – and in the two senses mentioned above – which deifies. I will bring into conversation insights learned from the Hesychast and the Ignatian traditions, as well as from modern and post-modern philosophical mysticism, Wittgenstein and Derrida in particular. The experiential approach will help me not to approach the doctrine of theosis/deification from the point of view of a “final product” –  a deified human person, a deified creation. My main attention will be given to the process of deification, to a journey including struggles with darkness, the discernment of spirits, the kenotic losing of oneself, as well as the paradoxical encounters with the light. In attending to these elements I will ask how the personal/ascetic and the communal/liturgical expression of the journey overlap and create one whole, as well as to how a need for a radical solidarity with others gradually replaces any remains of individualism and exclusivism. In the conclusion I will consider the hermeneutical problem of how to hear and understand the experience of the journey of deification when it includes stages which we have not lived through ourselves. At the same time I will show that exploring the doctrine of deification through its experiential roots helps in appreciating the gradual and pluriform nature of our understanding of what becoming by grace what Christ is by nature may mean.

Clinical Parapsychology: Extrasensory Exceptional Experiences is a graduate-level textbook designed to facilitate more reliable diagnosis, classification, treatment, and research. It is designed for clinicians, educators, and researchers challenged with investigating into the nature of distressing extrasensory (psychic) exceptional experiences. This textbook assists in interpreting extrasensory experiences reported in a wide diversity of context that are often viewed as religious, spiritual, anomalous, or transpersonal, and that vary greatly in subjective experience. This textbook is a valuable resource for both students and experienced professionals and is designed to be utilized by both individuals and educational institutions. Part I: Diagnosis (Differential & Co-Diagnosis), Part II: Classification (Dimensional & Categorical), Part III: Treatment Options (Recovery & Prevention), and Part IV: Research Methods & Measures.

This thesis explores how space and ritual functioned rhetorically in religious settings in ancient Greece. Epidaurus, Eleusis, and Delphi were the three sacred spaces used as case studies. These spaces represented three different functions of Greek religion: healing, mystery cult, and oracular divination. Using the method of close reading, rhetorical analysis of the spaces and rituals revealed that foundation myths gave rhetorical meaning to the place of the sanctuary, which framed the spaces within it. This meaning was communicated to the inner self of the supplicants who performed rituals in those spaces. The repetition of rituals in those spaces made them into places of public memory, and the interplay of ritual, place, and memory resulted in a sense of Greek and polis identity.

This book attempts to grasp the experience of the woman in hijab who has been an “object” of attention and research for a number of researchers so far. In order to succeed in this objective, it will put to work multiple perspectives that illustrate the personal and social aspects of the experience of a hijabi. Until now researchers have merely focused on the measurable aspects of veiling, whereas if the aim should be to comprehend a hijabi’s experience of veiling, one needs to take into consideration the subjective aspect of the experience as it also represents a means to experience God.
Ever since belief is positioned against Reason, the dominant scientific paradigm in sociology as well as in other disciplines based itself on the standard model in which veiling is conceived as a problematic practice. It is generally seen as a submission to collectivity or masculine domination. From the perspective of the modern individual, the concepts of belief and religion, which are not based on any scientific proof, are genuinely incompatible with the experience of modernity. The modern individual typically expresses his/her will and individuality in opposition to authorities. Under these circumstances veiling, which is a natural extension and expression of the Islamic faith in everyday life, appears to have no place in the modern era. Instead, it comes to denote a deviation from the norm. However, it should be acknowledged that the decision to veil can be an autonomous decision and an expression of individuality. Therefore to bypass, the individual aspect of these practices such as veiling can lead to a misunderstanding. For instance, the public sphere, whose boundaries are defined by the rationalist tradition, can filter out certain individual expressions as is the case with many hijabi women in Turkey and in various European countries. Hijabi women can experience various public restrictions that include a prohibition to enter school with a headscarf and the infamous burqa ban in France to name a few.
The flaw in the modern definition of individuality is to overlook different expressions of selfhood that we encounter in everyday life. Contrary to this modern perspective and the sociological research that depends upon the standard model, this study asserts that women’s decisions to experience God through the act of veiling can be autonomous. Accordingly, my aim is to try to understand the experience of veiling while remaining within and expanding the modernist perspective, since I ultimately believe that we can still make sense of the experience of a believer within the context of modernity.
Nevertheless, the experience of veiling is an issue that will always be half-finished, no matter how much it is worked. Because when veiling is being discussed, questions of class and gender as well as an ideological aspect are all involved. This multidimensionality of the issue allows us to use the headscarf as an instrument to understand the problematic aspects of secularism in Turkey and in the West as well as to scrutinize the instrumentalization of the female body. It can be an excellent means that both reveal our dogmatic thinking about individuality and presents a solution for the current situation.
In the first chapter of my study, I tried to make sense of the dynamics of the veiling issue taking into account the questions of class and gender. I tried to understand the influence of these dynamics in the works of secular women researchers. My analysis emphasizes the historical and cultural roots of the sexist, class-based, and ideological aspects which are involved. The socio-political climate of Turkey and the ongoing tension between religion and the state adds yet another dimension to this matter and explains the socio-political language that is used in sociological studies that seem to objectify hijabi women rather than grasping the reality of the experience of veiling. The fact that academic studies can not remain neutral in their examination of this problem led to a diminished representation of hijabis in sociological works. Although this, the concept of "body" as understood in feminism has also helped me in my examination of the experience of veiling especially when prejudices about oriental women come into play.
The second chapter investigates the private space of a hijabi woman and focuses on her struggle with the roles that are imposed by various kinds of authorities and identities. In this chapter, I scrutinize the issue in the public, private, and academic spheres. The last chapter asserts that the instruments of sociology, which are limited by nature, are insufficient to understand certain human experiences. This insufficiency of sociological instruments rises academic and disciplinary problems regarding the examination of the experience of veiling. As seen in the works of Marcel Gauchet and Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, the complexity of the question of veiling today requires a multidisciplinary approach, and more importantly, a critique of the existing established frameworks of sociological thought. A multidisciplinary approach makes it possible to investigate different meanings of human experience while challenging quantitative sociology's limited perspective.

The monster as a literary metaphor, it has commonly been observed, may represent individual or social anxiety, the resistance to change, and the threat of transformation—as in the threat of physically or psychologically becoming the monstrous Other. Such transformation is seen as threatening in contexts when stability is desired. However, the monster is also deployed occurs in situations in which instability and transformation may be valenced as spiritually productive, such as is found in mystical encounters. In currents of today’s popular culture, mystical activity and spiritual realization, far from being considered rarified states available only to ascetics, are increasingly portrayed as available to ordinary individuals. In this essay, I track the monstrous figure in American popular spiritualities as an intertextual creation contributing to a contemporary rescripting of notions of spiritual transformation. I utilize critical theory of metamodernism to unpack a new manner in which today’s monsters provide fruitful instabilities necessary for both personal as well as social transformations.

One exemplar of such a metamodern monstrous is found in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the popular American television show that ran from 1997-2003 and enjoys a continued cult following. Recognized as one of the first television efforts to focus on sacred/religious/spiritual content in a decidedly secular setting, Buffy has been the subject of numerous theoretical treatments, a few of which have applied monster theory (Santana and Erickson 2008, 2016; Schofield Clark 2005). However, none has yet situated the show, nor the monstrous Other in general, within a metamodern epistemic shift. I connect these pieces to suggest a means of understanding the increasing comfort with monsters’ multivalence—as enemy, lover, friend, provider of Gnostic wisdom, and productive destabilizer.

The spiritual and religious life of clients is an important clinical factor in therapy; it holds significant meaning and may support therapeutic outcome. This study explored client perceptions of the quality of care they received in therapy when disclosing their spiritual/religious life to their therapists as well as the factors that might contribute to their perceptions of care and disclosure. A total of 75 respondents participated in an online survey tool composed of quantitative and qualitative questions. Qualitative responses were coded and data was analyzed using descriptive statistics.  Findings showed that most clients (73%) shared some or all of their beliefs; in contrast only 40% shared their spiritual or religious experiences. Almost all clients (80-90%) have had a significant spiritual/religious experience, most often describing a feeling of interconnection and well-being, a loss, gain, or change of faith, heightened intuition, and/or a sensory experience (auditory, visual, or tactile.) Fifty percent of clients who shared their beliefs with their therapists were satisfied or very satisfied with the care they received; 23% were somewhat satisfied or unsatisfied. Of clients who shared their experiences 38% were satisfied and less than 10% were somewhat satisfied or unsatisfied. A poor working alliance, misattuned responses, lack of engagement, and the therapist’s lack of knowledge on the subject were reasons for low levels of satisfaction. The study concludes with suggestions on how to improve the therapeutic quality of care for spiritual or religious clients.

This paper suggests the adaptation of the phenomenological research method for the study of indigenous spirituality. As a method by which one clarifies obscure forms of experience, phenomenology developed in Western academia. For such a context, spirituality is understood as historically and culturally situated province of meaning, i.e., a form of experience different from the pragmatic experience of the everyday. Further, indigenous spirituality is understood as spirituality of the other, and more so, of an alien, Being an alienic form of experience, which may in radical ways differ from both spiritual and pragmatic provinces of meaning of the researcher herself, such second person experience presents the unknown in need of discovery. To overcome the self-evident difficulties in description and understanding of alienic experience, I operationalize Waldenfels' responsive interculturalism and Husserl's 1 'A wonder to behold', that is, "something miraculous which inspires a sense of wonder," thauma idesthai, is a phrase in early archaic Greek which was used to describe well-crafted works (Neer, 2010 , 67). In philosophy, wonder, not as an emotion but rather, as marveling the miracle of how things are, is associated with the beginning of philosophical reflection (Dahl, 2019; Kenaan, 2011; Louchakova-Schwartz, 2018).

An essay on the role of imagination in religion, including the way religion itself is imagined. Features a critical assessment of recent books including T. M. Luhrmann's How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others; Jeffrey Kripal's The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge and the same author's Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion; J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei's The Life of Imagination; Revealing and Making the World; David Morgan's Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment; Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters; and Jack Miles's Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story.

Does a direct experience of God and the associated grace-filled transformation make people infallible, or can even saints still be wrong when they interpret who can be saved and who cannot, what forms of life people should choose, which political systems, figures and positions they should support? This article examines what St Gregory Palamas says on the nature of the saints' experience and knowledge, how stability and progress are interrelated in his notion of deification, and what the consequences are of his differentiation between knowledge coming from above and natural knowledge. Among the reasons for the appreciation of St Gregory Palamas in twentieth and twenty first century theology is undoubtedly his emphasis on the real presence of God in creation, and, in particular, in the human experience of being reached, purified, and transformed by God, who through his grace joins to himself whom he wishes. It could be argued that his essence-energy distinction, or his accounts of the psychosomatic techniques of prayer, all serve this one goal: to defend the reality of divine-human communion. Preserving divine simplicity, on the one hand, and the possibility of human deification, on the other, Palamas argued that the eschatological divine fullness of life can irrupt into this life, as in the case of Christ's Incarnation. Through Christ, it can transform people who are found worthy to see this fullness in terms of the uncreated deifying light. In this article, I will examine the epistemological consequences of the direct experiences of and participation in God. My basic question will be: according to Palamas, does the experience of the deifying light make holy men and women infallible in their theological statements, in their discernment of what are, and what are not, good morals or even good political decisions?

This article examines the question of the researcher's bodily experience in the production of ethnographic knowledge, discussing fieldwork in the Brazilian Spiritualists Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn). Focussing on spirit mediumship, it proposes a twofold analysis discerning local categories from those widely in use in other spiritual contexts and in the scholarly debates, and considering how they are articulated and lived through. Hence, it tackles questions such as how do mediums learn their practice? How do they discern between different categories of spirits? How does mediumistic experience inform notions of the body and the self? In doing so, it shifts the focus from belief to experience, including that of the researcher, as part of the ethnographic encounter. The process of learning spirit mediumship is hereby approached considering the cultivation of a mediumistic body as an intersubjective process of development of a specific mode of knowing, exploring how the cognitive, bodily and affective dimensions interweave. This kind of analysis demands a peculiar reflexive attention to the ethnographer's re-education of perception as a way of becoming skilled in local ways of knowing and communicating, producing common grounds of interaction in the field.

Volos Academy for Theological Studies
International Conference on St Symeon the New Theologian
(Volos, May 26-29, 2022)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pClqfxA-e3M&ab_channel=%CE%91%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B4%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%AF%CE%B1%CE%98%CE%B5%CE%BF%CE%BB%CE%BF%CE%B3%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8E%CE%BD%CE%A3%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%85%CE%B4%CF%8E%CE%BD%CE%92%CF%8C%CE%BB%CE%BF%CF%85

The Orthodox liturgy is a religious phenomenon that can be analyzed phenomenologically and theologically alike, given the emphasis that both phenomenology and Orthodox theology place on experience. By proposing the Kingdom of God instead of the natural world without being able to annihilate the latter in the name of the former, the liturgy seeks divine-human communion. Through the dialogue of prayer, through symbolic and iconic openings, as well as through apophatic theology, the liturgy emphasizes the horizon of mystery as a horizon essential to the way man positions himself before God. The present text attempts to demonstrate that apophaticism, understood as an experience of the mysterious presence of God, is one of the crucial dimensions of the Orthodox liturgy; and that this apophatic presence of God reveals a way of thinking which does not become onto-theology, not even when using concepts borrowed from metaphysics. The overcoming of onto-theology is achieved here not by abandoning concepts such as “being” and “cause” but by placing the language game in the field of prayer and apophatic theology.

This book examines the nature and significance of religious enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England. In the early modern period, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was a smear word used to discredit the dissenters of the radical Reformation as dangerous religious fanatics. In England, the term gained prominence from the Civil War period and throughout the eighteenth century. Anglican ministers and the proponents of the Enlightenment used it more widely against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers or anyone claiming superior knowledge. As a result, our understanding of enthusiasm is largely influenced by the hostile discourse of Augustan moralist and early Enlighteners. But who exactly were these enthusiasts? What did they believe in, how did they operate as a community and what impact did they have on their contemporaries? This book aims to answer these questions by concentrating on the notorious case of the French Prophets. It demonstrates how the understanding of enthusiasm evolved around 1700, designating anything from a religious fanaticism to a social epidemic and even a bodily disease. It offers the first comprehensive approach to enthusiasm, looking at this multifarious issue from a successively social, religious, cultural, political and medical perspective. Based on extensive archival research, it sheds new light on the reality of enthusiasm away from the hostility of Enlightenment discourse.

This article extends the realm of spiritual experiences to art and nature-based experiences by adopting a phenomenological heuristic methodology. This enquiry's approach consists in comparing the language found to describe the phenomenology of non-ordinary experiences in James's classic text of religious and mystical experiences, with (a) Funch's metastudy on the psychology of aesthetic appreciations, and (b) Ashley's enquiry about Wilderness Spirituality or Nature-Based Experiences. In the first part of the enquiry, Elkins et al.'s humanistic-phenomenological definition of spirituality is accepted as a guiding heuristic principle. Their assumption of experience as the core of spirituality finds further support from McGilchrist's more recent Divided Brain theory, which looks at the role played by the, metaphorically speaking, Right Hemisphere for nature, art and religion. In the second part, a textual analysis is carried out among the three texts, which aims at bringing out the experiential similarities within different contexts (religion, art and nature). The textual approach allows for non-religious experiences to be reclassified as phenomenologically analogous to the spiritual ones and for extending spirituality's field of studies to other non-religious disciplines. Steve Taylor's wider theorization of spontaneous awakening experiences (SAE) provides for a more comprehensive classificatory system in which to place aesthetic experiences (AE) and Nature-Based Experiences (NBE) within the expanded class of awakening experiences, hence reconciliating Funch's original aesthetic classification with a wider definition of spirituality.

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https://doi.org/10.33929/sherm.2021.vol3.no2.02

Do mystical experiences make it rational to believe in God? A fair number of theistic philosophers have thought so, and, for the mystic who is ignorant of current scientific findings, perhaps that conclusion is correct. But the ignorant are not best qualified to judge: let us see how science might inform judgment. Here I will focus most particularly on the neurological basis of mystical experiences (MEs). It might initially seem that the evidence for such a basis is theologically benign—neutral on the question whether MEs may reasonably be considered veridical perceptions of the divine. I shall argue that this is a mistake.

This article looks at the place of religious experience within the whole web of life, at discernment between its authentic and inauthentic forms, and at the understanding of progress on the way towards God, as described by a Greek ascetic of the 11th century, St Symeon the New Theologian, and a 16th century Spanish mystic St Ignatius of Loyola. It shows where the Hesychast and the Ignatian traditions overlap, where they differ, and what one can give to and receive from the other.

In every period in history the definition of insanity is pertinent, and its meaning is different. We owe this perception to a large movement in the scholarship of the nineteen-sixties and seventies that changed our concept of what constitutes sanity and insanity. This scholarship examined the ways in which such concepts were formed as part of the medical, mental, social, cultural, but above all political settings. A number of important studies on psychology and psychiatry, whether in the fields of social sciences, the humanities or medicine (by Michel Foucault, Roy Porter, William Bynum, Gladys Swain, Marcel Gauchet, Franco Basaglia, among others), has radically changed the way we look at insanity. These studies brought insanity out of the individual dimension, and made it a social, cultural and political phenomenon. In a way, the wave of study of psychiatry of the sixties and seventies was a reply to the development of psychoanalysis in the first half of the twentieth century, which concentrated on the psychological dimension in the individual. These new directions of thought shifted the understanding of what constitutes insanity from the individual to the social and political dimensions. Nevertheless, they still placed the individual in the center, affected by the social settings, mental constructs and politics. This perspective was conditioned by the link between psychology and medicine, according to which the insane person was perceived as sick.
The present study chooses a different line of investigation. In a way, it goes in the opposite direction in focusing on societies which sanctified what we consider today as insanity. These societies looked for spiritual values in abnormal, in-sane, behavior, and legitimized it by attributing a unique spiritual character to figures who portrayed it. In this they were changing the social and cultural norms related to abnormality and normality. A parallel process can also be detected in contemporary societies. Only few decades ago, people in Western societies who turned to healers, clairvoyants, and mediums were considered to be themselves not in their right mind. Today, not only is such behavior legitimized, but this is even becoming a norm. These so-called ‘new age’ phenomena express the invasion of the religious sphere into modern secular societies. We do not call them ‘religious,’ but ‘spiritual’ in order to reject the religious establishment and its historical framework. However, such expressions of spirituality have long been the realm of the religious sphere. The question is why secular societies today have become more and more inclined to adopt and legitimize these expressions of spirituality, and justify their functionality.

In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in social and historical development.

Early Christians looked to figures who embodied extremes of behavior-like the holy fool, the ascetic, the martyr-to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for the transition from paganism to Christianity.

A developing society leaves porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity, in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological transformation.

This article addresses theistic and atheistic spirituality. It argues against the view that atheism and spirituality are not compatible. In doing so, it draws on the thesis of the religious psycholo-gist Bernhard Grom that all spiritual experiences are based on a common core and wants to exemplify that. By comparing the spiritual experience of an atheist (André Comte-Sponville, a contemporary French philosopher) and a theist (Lucie Christine, a 19th-century French Catho-lic), it is possible to determine to what extent the two actually share a common experience. The difference lies only in the respective cognitive and motivational context – before, during and after the experience – so that the intention, expectation and interpretation of the experience are different. The thesis presented here is intended to encourage the development of dialogue be-tween theists and atheists. It is perhaps precisely because of their different worldviews, that they can encourage each other to reflect on their spiritual experiences and thus benefit from each other.