Response to Russell T. McCutcheon's Review Essay: "Will Your Cognitive Anchor Hold in the Storms of Culture?" 78/4: 1182-1193

Abstract

This response was to have been published in 79/1. That it appears only now, a year after it was submitted by Professor Taves, is entirely the fault of the editor. RUSSELL MCCUTCHEON'S review essay obscures the many points on which we agree. These include the importance of analyzing the history of discourses of “religious experience” (see Taves 1999, 2005); the difficulties inherent in a neuroscience of “religious experience” (Taves 2009: 16–22); the necessity of an attributional approach to experiences deemed religious understood as a contested subset of experiences deemed special (Taves 2009), and the importance of studying processes of singularization and valuation (see Taves 2010a, 2011). McCutcheon takes issue with my etic recasting of religion-like terms under the “seemingly more inclusive” heading of specialness on the grounds that my examples too closely resemble those we typically consider religious to constitute a reconsideration of the data. Although I thought that mention of public lands, historic monuments, flags, friends, children, and mammalian mother–infants bonds (Taves 2009: 29–35) along with the subtitle of the book would clearly signal that I am not equating religious and special, McCutcheon and others have assumed otherwise.