Religious
Experience

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Schedule

The schedule listed below is tentative; see the discussion of the concept of a research seminar to understand why. It will be adjusted as the class proceeds.

Provisional Schedule | Bibliography

Provisional Schedule

Here is a list of topics that the seminar might consider covering, together with readings that refer to the bibliography below. Each week, a short core reading will be assigned that we all read together. In addition, each student will read one other relevant resource and then both submit a review of that resource for our resource collection and bring that resource into the seminar discussion.

Week 1 Introduction
Week 2 Phenomenology I: Anecdotal Collections (James, Gilkes, Bonaventure, Maslow)
Week 3 Phenomenology II: Systematic Analysis (Twiss, Fischer, Kristeller, Hardy)
Week 4

Classic Debates I: Perennialists (Schuon, Huxley, Smith) and Contextualists (Katz, Bagger)
Week 5 Classic Debates II: Pure Consciousness (Forman)
Week 6 Social Psychology I: Anomalous Experiences (Cardeña, Randi, Bailey)
Week 7 Social Psychology II: Surveys of Religious Experience (Hood, Wildman)
Week 8 Social Psychology III: Individual in Society (Batson, Beit-Hallahmi)
Week 9 Social Psychology IV: Society in Individuals (Berger, Durkheim, Shachter & Singer)
Week 10 Cognitive Neuroscience I: Meditation and the Brain (Austin, d’Aquili, Newberg, Deikman)
Week 11 Cognitive Neuroscience II: Religion and the Brain (Alper, Andresen, Ashbroook, Russell)
Week 12 Cognitive Neuroscience III: Religious Experience and Drugs (Smith, Pahnke)
Week 13 Cognitive Neuroscience IV: Evolution and Experience (Giovannoli, Hefner)
Week 14 Philosophical Interpretations (Alston, Proudfoot, Sharf)

Bibliography

Alper, Matthew. 2001. The God Part of the Brain. Rogue Press.

Alston, William P. 1993. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Cornell University Press. Reprint ed.

Andresen, Jensine; Forman, Robert K. C. (eds). 2000. Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7/10-11 (Nov-Dec 2000). Imprint Academic.

Andresen, Jensine (ed.). 2001. Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience. Cambridge University Press.

Ashbrook, James B.; Albright, Carol Rausch. 1997. The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet. Pilgrim Press.

Austin, James H. 1998. Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness. MIT Press.

Bagger, Matthew C. 1999. Religious Experience, Justification, and History. Cambridge University Press.

Bailey, Lee Worth; Yates, Jenny (eds.) 1996. The Near-Death Experience: A Reader. Routledge.

Batson, C. Daniel; Ventis, W. Larry; Schoenrade, Patricia A., (eds.). 1993. Religion and the Individual: A Social-Psychological Perspective. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press.

Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin; Argyle, Michael. 1997. The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience. Routledge.

Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Doubleday.

Bonaventure. 1988. The Mind's Road to God. In Cousins, Bonaventure.

Cardeña, Etzel; Lynn, Steven Jay; Krippner, Stanley, eds. 2000. Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence. American Psychological Association.

Cousins, Ewart. 1988. Bonaventure: The Soul's Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis. Paulist Press.

d’Aquili, Eugene; Newberg, Andrew B. 1999. The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Deikman, Arthur J. “A Functional Approach to Mysticism.” In Andresen and Forman, eds. (2000).

Durkheim, Émile. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. George Allen & Unwin.

Fischer, R. 1971. “A Cartography of Understanding Mysticism.” Science 174 (Nov. 26): 897-904.

Forman, Robert K. C., ed. 1990. The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy. Oxford University Press.

Forman, Robert K. C. 1999. Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness. State University of New York Press.

Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend. 2000. If It Wasn't for the Women...: Black Women's Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community. Orbis Books.

Giovannoli, Joseph. 2001. The Biology of Belief: How Our Biology Biases Our Beliefs and Perceptions. Rosetta Press.

Hardy, Alistair. 1979. The Spiritual Nature of Man: A Study of Contemporary Religious Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hefner, Philip. 1993. The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion. Fortress Press.

Hesse, Hermann. 1982. Siddhartha. Bantam. Reprint ed.

Hood, Ralph W. (ed.) 1995. A Handbook of Religious Experience. Religious Education Press.

Huxley, Aldous. 1990. The Perennial Philosophy. HarperCollins. Reprint ed.

James, William. 1902. Varieties of Religious Experience. Longmans, Green & Co.

Katz, Steven T. (ed.) 1978. Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. Oxford University Press.

Katz, Steven T. (ed.) 1984. Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Oxford University Press.

Katz, Steven T. (ed.) 1992. Mysticism and Language. Oxford University Press.

Katz, Steven T. (ed.) 2000. Mysticism and Sacred Scripture. Oxford University Press.

Kristeller, Jean. 2001. A Multimodal Developmental Model of Meditation Effects. Presented to conference on Neuroscience and the Person, Montreal.

Maslow, Abraham H. 1971. Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. New York, Viking Press.

Newberg, Andrew; d’Aquili, Eugene. 2001. Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief. Ballantine Books.

Pahnke, Walter N. 1966. “Drugs and Mysticism.” International Journal of Parapsychology 8: 295-314.

Proudfoot, Wayne. 1986. Religious Experience. University of California Press.

Randi. 1982. Flim-Flam: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and other Delusions. Prometheus Books.

Russell, Robert John; Murphy, Nancey; Meyering, Theo C.; Arbib, Michael (eds.). 2000. Neuroscience and the Person. CTNS and Vatican Observatory.

Schuon, Frithjof. 1984. The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Quest Books.

Schachter, S and Singer, J. E. “Cognitive, Social, and Psychological Determinants of Emotional States.” Psychological Review 69: 379-399.

Sharf, Robert. "The Rhetoric of Experience and the Study of Religion.” In Andresen and Forman, eds. (2000).

Smith, Huston. 1993. Forgotten Truth. HarperSanFrancisco. Reprint ed.

Smith, Huston. 2000. Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals. New York: Penguin Putnam (J. P. Tarcher).

Twiss, Sumner B.; Conser, Walter H., Jr. 1992. Experience of the Sacred: Readings in the Phenomenology of Religion. Hanover, NH: Brown University Press.

Wildman, Wesley J. 2000. Profound Experiences. Presented to Boston Theological Society.

Wildman, Wesley J.; Brothers, Leslie A. 2000. “A Neuropsychological-Semiotic Theory of Religious Experiences.” In Robert Russell et al., eds., Neuroscience and the Person.

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