Product Description: Although religious innovation in America historically has been the norm rather than the exception, mainstream Americans have often viewed new religious movements with suspicion and occasionally with outright alarm. The question motivating many studies of new religious movements has been 'why would someone join these religions'? In 'Antiquity and Social Reform', Dawn Hutchinson offers at least one answer to this often repeated query...read more

Product Description: In this enlightening and original study on the cultivation of a religious understanding of nature, Leon Niemoczynski applies Charles Sanders Peirce's thought on metaphysics to 'ecstatic naturalism,' the philosophical perspective developed by Robert Corrington...read more

Product Description: Recently, many philosophers of religion have sought to defend the rationality of religious belief by shifting the burden of proof onto the critic of religious belief. Some have appealed to extraordinary religious experience in making their case...read more

Product Description: In our contemporary evolutionary worldview, the universe is in a continuous creative transformation. What is true of the universe is also true of human life, says eminent theologian Karl Peters, as he explores the many forms of spiritual transformations - from predictable passages experienced with age, to the unexpected passages we are required to make, to religious conversion, to calamity and even death...read more

The author shares his perspective on how to find and know God, blending philosophy and science to argue that the knowledge is hard-wired into the brain, and introducing the seven stages one must pass through to fully experience the divine

Product Description: Many regard religious experience as the essence of religion, arguing that narratives might be created and rituals invented but that these are always secondary to the original experience itself. However, the concept of "experience" has come under increasing fire from a range of critics and theorists...read more

Product Description: A Christian scholar of Buddhism, Paul Ingram here develops a "primordial theology" that deals with the key religious issues of out times, including religious ways of knowing, the character of the Sacred, our relation with nature, and the various forms of liberation - of the self, of others, and the "final liberation" from death - with which all religious Ways must deal...read more

Product Description: The "science of religion" is an important element in the interpretation of William James's work and in the methodology of the study of religion. An authority on pragmatism and the philosophy of religion, Wayne Proudfoot and a stellar group of contributors from a variety of disciplines including religion, philosophy, psychology, and history, bring innovative perspectives to James's work...read more

Product Description: First published in 1902, William James's Varieties of Religious Experience is considered a classic in religious studies and the psychology of religion. But how has James's classic study weathered decades of development in psychology and behavioral sciences? Do the assertions about religious experience in the Varieties still ring true in light of neuro-cognitive and neuro-hormonal research, resiliency studies, studies of temperament, and traumatic studies? By extending William James's own research throughout the century since its publication this volume seeks to answer those questions...read more

Product Description: Mark Wynn argues that the landscape of philosophical theology looks rather different from the perspective of a re-conceived theory of emotion. In matters of religion, we do not need to opt for objective content over emotional form or vice versa...read more

Product Description: Does the philosophy of Martin Heidegger represent the emergence of a secular anthropology that requires religious thought to redefine the religious dimension in human existence? In this critical response, Lacoste confronts the ultimate definition of human nature, the humanity of the human...read more

Product Description: Pragmatists analyze science, religion, art and epistemology

Product Description: There is perhaps no greater constant in religious intuition and experience than the presence of light. In spiritual traditions East and West, light is not only ubiquitous but something that assumes strikingly similar forms in altogether different historical and cultural settings...read more

Product Description: Does religious thinking stand in opposition to postmodernity? Does the existence of God present the ultimate challenge to metaphysics? Strands of continental thought, especially those running from Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, focus on individual consciousness as the horizon for all meaning and provide modern philosophy of religion with much of its present ferment...read more

Product Description: This book builds on contemporary discussion of 'mysticism' and religious experience by examining the process and content of 'religious knowing' in classical and modern Advaita. Drawing from the work of William Alston and Alvin Plantinga, Thomas Forsthoefel examines key streams of Advaita with special reference to the conditions, contexts, and scope of epistemic merit in religious experience...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book begins by drawing attention to the fact that many people acknowledge having had a transcendent experience, namely an event in which they had the impression that they were in contact with something boundless and limitless, which they could not get hold of, and which utterly surpassed human capacities...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Throws down a challenge to religious studies, offering a multidisciplinary approach - including developmental psychology, neuropsychology, philosophy of mind, and anthropology.

(view table of contents)

Product Description: This volume by acknowledged practitioners, researchers, and theoreticians in the field of religion/clinical psychology is dedicated to a number of propositions. Religion plays a significant role in the lives of the majority of Americans and, therefore, should be taken into account in the provision of psychological consultation and treatment...read more

Product Description: This work presents an intensive, illuminating and fascinating analysis and interpretation of Gabriel Marcel's basic thought on human existence and its ultimate religious meaning. It focuses on Marcel's examination of religious experience as rooted in the human condition, lived by beings who are basically incarnate, in situation, continually en route, beset by tension, contradiction, and ambiguity...read more

A modern philosopher described religion as that region in which all the enigmas of the world are solved.Smith argues in Experience and God that religion itself has become an enigma for modern man. In the book, smith attempts to reunite philosophy with religion. He argues that in recent decades the prevailing attitude has been chiefly one of indifference. This indifference, leading to the failure of understanding can be overcome only through radical reflection and self-criticism: a re-consideration of the nature of religion, its place in the total structure of human life, and its relations to the secular culture in which the faith of man must live. The task Smith lays out must be of a largely philosophical nature, not only because of the necessity to understand religion in relation to a comprehensive scheme of things, but also because the idea of religion is intimately connected with the issues of metaphysics. Smith's purpose is to bridge the gap between the ontological approach to God as represented by Augustine, Anselm, and Bonaventure, and the cosmological approach represented by Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great. Smith shows that, although the two approaches significantly differ, they can be interpreted as ways of leading the meditating mind to the Presence of God, through the soul and through the world.