Open Theology
February 2, 2025
Sariyar Murat
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...
Open Theology
2024
Murat Sariyar
2 citations
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 Theology
January 10, 2021
Feise-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 Theology
March 13, 2020
Stepanenko Walter Scott
2 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...
Open Theology
January 31, 2020
G. Hart James
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...
Open Theology
October 1, 2018
Olga Louchakova-Schwartz
1 citation
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...
Open Theology
October 1, 2018
Bermant Gordon
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...
Open Theology
October 1, 2018
D. Long Jeffery
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...
Open Theology
October 1, 2018
DeRoo Neal
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,...
Open Theology
November 30, 2017
Zangwill Nick
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.
Open Theology
October 2, 2017
Panin Stanislav
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...
Open Theology
June 2, 2017
Kugelmann Robert
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...
Open Theology
January 31, 2017
R. Hustwit J.
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...
Open Theology
January 26, 2017
Olga Louchakova-Schwartz
19 citations
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...