Week 11 - Religious Experience

What is the nature of religious experience, spiritual awareness, mysticism, visions of god, and other types of peak experiences? What is the definition of a religious experience? Why do we exclude or include certain types of experiences as religious? What kinds of problems arise when we attempt to characterize the nature of any human experience? Are these problems new, or do we see echos of Kant, James, Freud, Jung, or Smart? This week examines a range of methodologies and approaches to the study of the human experience, with a special focus on experiences of god, liberation, rapture, and possession.

Lecture

Psychology of Religion and Religious Experience
- Slides

Reading

"Chapter 10: Religious and Spiritual Experience," (2009) by R. Hood, P Hill, and B. Spilka in The Psychology of Religion, New York: The Guilford Press, pp.288-330 [42].

Additional Resources

"Mysticism", op.cite.

Discussion

Is religious experience a psychological phenomenon?