Deleuze’s philosophy, celebrated for its affirmation of life, also offers a profound and nuanced exploration of death, challenging conventional understandings of individuality and existence. Through key concepts such as the “death drive,” the “virtual,” and “assemblage,” Deleuze frames death not as a terminus, but as an integral process within life itself. This article critically examines...
Abstract My goal here is to make use of Deleuzian philosophy as a springboard for cultivating “being a child of the moment,” which is a phrase stemming from Sufism. Being fully present and aware in each moment is associated with surrendering oneself to the divine will and accepting whatever comes in the present moment without resistance. Unlike approaches that translate Deleuzian insights into...
Open TheologyJanuary 10, 2021Feise-Mahnkopp Patricia
On a phenomenal level, no differences between the mystical and the initial sequence of psychotic experience are to be found. Both are characterized by transliminality (i.e., an experience of consciousness transcending both the psychophysical and the rational realms). However, the situation is different if we integrate psychodynamic implications before and after those experiences into the...
Open TheologyMarch 13, 2020Stepanenko Walter Scott2 citations
In Religious Experience, Wayne Proudfoot argued that a tout court rejection of reductionism in accounts of religious experience was not viable. According to Proudfoot, it’s possible to distinguish between an illegitimate practice of descriptive reductionism and the legitimate practice of explanatory reductionism. The failure to distinguish between these two forms of reductionism resulted in a...
There is a distinctive wonder bordering on and awakening to the philosophy of religion within Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. This is not primarily a wonder directed to how things are or that they are, but rather the wonder connected to the most fundamental principle of transcendental phenomenology. That principle is the ancient principle of the convertibility of being with what is true...
Abstract The secondary literature on religious epistemology has focused extensively on whether religious experience can provide evidence for God’s existence. In this article, I suppose that religious experience can do this, but I consider whether it can provide adequate evidence for justified belief in God. I argue that it can. This requires a couple of moves. First, I consider the threshold...
Abstract Phenomenologies of religious experience have been developed by Max Scheler and via Alfred Schutz’s frameworks of “multiple realities” and “finite provinces of meaning.” For both, religious experience resists the pragmatic imperatives of the mechanistic worldview or world of working. Schutz’s paradigm begins with a distinctive noetic religious epoché opening the religious province, in...
Abstract The article consists of two parts. The first part outlines two conceptions of religious experience that can be found in the last three philosophical books of Michel Henry: the first, broad conception of religious experience is connected with the transcendental relation of human self to God as proposed by Henry; the second, narrower conception concerns the story of salvation as told in...
Abstract There are three models of pain in the phenomenology of religious experience. The first model suggests that pain is instrumental to attaining the desired religious experience. The second model proposes that pain is constitutive of the desired religious experience. The third model, which is a model of senseless pain in religious experience, is underdeveloped. I provide an exposition of...
Abstract Amplifying the idea of religious experience as occurring within an encompassing “religious province of meaning” and developing the personal character of the experience of God in the Abrahamic religious traditions, this paper argues that mystics in those traditions experience God “objectively.” Their experience of God is that of experiencing God as what Alfred Schutz called a...
Open TheologyNovember 1, 2018James M. Nelson, Jonah Koetke2 citations
Abstract An enduring feature of Christian religious life has been the experience of the demonic. This experience can be found in the New Testament, most obviously in reported encounters with demons, but more centrally in the language of spiritual warfare that pervades much of the Pauline literature. In the Patristic period, these ideas were cemented in the Christian tradition in the writings of...
Abstract The Gathas, a corpus of seventeen poems in Old Avestan composed by the ancient Iranian poet-priest Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) ca. 1200 B.C.E., is the foundation document of Zoroastrian religion. Even though the dualistic axiology of the Gathas has been widely noted, it has proved very difficult to understand the meaning and genre of the corpus or the position of Zarathushtra’s ideas with...
Dennis Hirota is a modern master of Shin Buddhism who for several decades has explicated the role of natural language in fostering Buddhist awakening. At the core of his oeuvre is the claim that Shin Buddhism’s founder, Shinran Shonin (1173-1263), accepted the earlier Mahayana teaching of nondual awareness as a necessary condition for awakening. Shinran’s unique contribution was to insist that...
Is religious experience necessarily the product of one specific tradition? The constructivist approach to religious experience which prevails in the contemporary academy certainly suggests that this is the case. But is this not at odds with the idea of an ultimate reality that exists objectively and independently of what any given group of human beings may think about it? This paper argues that...
This paper: a) offers a phenomenology of the religious that challenges the assumption that “religious experience” is primarily to be understood as a type of experience, called ‘religious’ experience, which is distinct from other (i.e., ‘non-religious’) experiences; and b) traces out some implications of this for phenomenological and other scholarly approaches to religion. To achieve these aims,...
Abstract Simply reading sacred texts across religious boundaries rarely achieves an “aha moment” or an encounter with ultimacy. The possibility of engaging with ultimacy requires establishing some necessary conditions. Any attempt to compel an experience results in false spiritual encounters rather than permitting authentic ones to occur. Therefore, a balance is necessary between being open to...
Abstract “Ultimacy,” it is argued, is not an area that academic studies in theology nor the study of religion can properly investigate; nevertheless, it is also illegitimate to argue therefore that claims to it are simply linguistic power plays. Using an autobiographical methodology, the author explores how their own “imagined” “mystical” experience and scholarly studies may shed light on...
This article replies to Manuel Fasko’s “The Demystification of Nick Zangwill’s ‘Myth of Religious Experience’” (2017), showing how author’s argument against the possibility of religious experience presented in “The Myth of Religious Experience” (2004) remains in tact.
The article concentrates on the history of Astral Karate, its doctrine and sources. Astral Karate was a late-Soviet eclectic spiritual movement based on esoteric interpretations of martial arts and yoga. The term “Astral Karate” had spread in the 1980s thanks to spiritual leader and underground esoteric author Valery Averianov who called himself Guru Var Avera. On one hand, the movement...
An ordinary religious experience does not entail an overwhelming sense of the Divine; it is not a “numinous” experience. It is instead easily ignored. In a phenomenological psychological inquiry into such a religious experience, both the noema, the “what” experienced, and the noesis, the mode of givenness of the experience, manifested themselves in distinctive ways. The paper examines a simple...
The reaction to multiple religious belonging has been fraught with anxiety in the monotheistic traditions. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of people report belonging to multiple religions. I propose that it is most useful to think of multiple religious belonging not so much as an expression of choice, but just the opposite. Multiple religious belonging is best explained as the ontological...
AbstractApplying Michel Henry’s philosophical framework to the phenomenological analysis of religious experience, the author introduces a concept of material introspection and a new theory of the constitution of religious experience in phenomenologically material interiority. As opposed to ordinary mental self-scrutiny, material introspection happens when the usual outgoing attention is...
Abstract: The aim of the paper is to discuss the possible application of the theory of embodied cognition and the category of image schemata to the study of religious concepts within the Cognitive Science of Religion. Departing from the notion of counterintuitiveness and Boyer’s description of religious representations as minimally counterintuitive, the author briefly discusses the critique of...