Melissa Gordon Wolf

What Counts as Religious Experience? The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences as a Tool for Analysis across Cultures

PsyArXiv December 28, 2019 Ann Taves, Melissa Gordon Wolf, Elliott Daniel Ihm et al. preprint

When operationalizing ‘religiosity’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious experience’ as measurable constructs, researchers tacitly treat them as if they were cross-culturally stable ‘things’ rather than investigating the way culturally-laden concepts, such as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual,’ are used to interpret or appraise contested aspects of human life within and across cultures. To illustrate the...