Product Description: The renowned scientist Sir Alister Hardy approached the complex field of religious and spiritual experience in a similar disciplined and scientific manner in which he approached natural science. Asking people from the public to send him accounts of first-hand experiences with spiritual or religious powers, he established the Religious Experience Research Centre that has remained at the forefront of the academic study of religious experiences...read more

Product Description: Bettina E. Schmidt explores experiences usually labelled as spirit possession, a highly contested and challenged term, using extensive ethnographic research conducted in São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil and home to a range of religions which practice spirit possession...read more

Product Description: Acute Melancholia and Other Essays deploys spirited and progressive approaches to the study of Christian mysticism and the philosophy of religion. Ideal for novices and experienced scholars alike, the volume makes a forceful case for thinking about religion as both belief and practice, in which traditions marked by change are passed down through generations, laying the groundwork for their own critique...read more

While filming in rural Wisconsin, successful Hollywood director Alan Wilde finds himself drawn to a lovely, intriguing Amish schoolteacher, Susan Peachey, but their love is threatened by the dramatic difference between their worlds

Product Description: There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan...read more

Product Description: This book is Wiebe's defense of the claim that a significant form of spiritual experience is found in 'knowing something we have no right to know'. He selects forty-five first-hand accounts from a data-base at the University of Wales to make his case, and, in solidarity with those people, recounts something of his own experience...read more

Product 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...read more

Product Description: Whether like Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus or Wesley’s “strangely warmed heart,” the desire to meet or be met by God is as old as humanity. But America has been the fertile seed bed for what William James famously called “varieties of religious experience...read more

What is the value of religious and spiritual experiences within human life? Are we evolutionarily programmed to have such experiences? How will emerging technologies change such experiences in the future? Wesley Wildman addresses these key intellectual questions and more, offering a spiritually evocative naturalist interpretation of the diverse variety of religious and spiritual experiences. He describes these experiences, from the common to the exceptional, and offers innovative classifications for them based on their neurological features and internal qualities. His account avoids reductionalistic oversimplifications and instead synthesizes perspectives from many disciplines, including philosophy and natural sciences, into a compelling account of the meaning and value of religious and spiritual experiences in human life. The resulting interpretation does not assume a supernatural worldview nor does it reject such experiences as positive affirmation of this-worldly existence.

Product Description: The Varieties of Religious Experience is William James's classic survey of religious belief. With psychological insight and philosophical rigor, James wrote a truly foundational text for modern belief. Matthew Bradley's wide-ranging new edition--the most critically up-to-date and inclusive edition of James's masterpiece available in paperback--showcases ideas that continue to fuel modern debates on atheism and faith...read more

Product Description: David Morgan builds on his previous groundbreaking work to offer this new, systematically integrated theory of the study of religion as visual culture. Providing key tools for scholars across disciplines studying the materiality of religions, Morgan gives an accessibly written theoretical overview including case studies of the ways seeing is related to touching, hearing, feeling, and such ephemeral experiences as dreams, imagination, and visions...read more

Product Description: The Workshop of Being brings into conversation Jonathan Edwards and William James on the pragmatic value of religious experience. The author shows how Edwards and James employ psychological dynamics and theological and philosophical investigations to interpret religious feeling and its value for the transformation of an unfinished universe in need of repair...read more

Product Description: Focusing on Edwards' earliest sermons and his personal writings, which stand prior to his study of Locke and his use of the technical term the 'sense of the heart,' this work demonstrates the formative impact his biblically grounded religious experiences had on his theology of religious experience...read more