While previous work has focused largely on discourse, contemporary sociological research has started to examine how the embodied, sensory dimensions of religious practice matter in the construction of religious experience. This paper contributes to this development by drawing sociological attention to the religious cultivation of a particular class of embodied experiences: somatic inversions....
When most people think of Cambridge, Massachusetts, they probably think about the prominent institutions of higher education located there and imagine it as among the most secular places in North America. Who knew that around every corner one might find spiritual pilgrims of every sort exploring their past lives and chakras? Courtney Bender's choice of location for this study of “individual...
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...
Scholars often assume that religious preference, religiosity, and scientific training affect the incidence of anomalous experiences. Caucasian-American, African-American, Chinese, and Japanese college students were polled regarding déjà vu, night paralysis, extrasensory perception (ESP), contact with the dead, out-of-body experience (OBE), and belief in ESP. Although the incidence of reported...