Two books have significantly shaped the social-scientific study of religious experience: William James's 1903 The Varieties of Religious Experience and Wayne Proudfoot's 1985 Religious Experience. We now have a third. Taves follows James and Proudfoot in using an “overbelief” model, which separates the experiences themselves from the ideas that people use to interpret them. Taves differs from...
Sociologists of religion, in their concern for the social effects of religious institutions and the functions of religious meaning systems for people's identities, have neglected to study religious experiences. This paper explores Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow experiences and Alfred Schutz's theory of the tuning-in relationship as possible approaches to studying the experiential...