Religious Experience And Experiencing Religion In Religious Education

In Europe, religious and spiritual education happens in a context which is at the same time increasingly secular and religiously plural. This places the problem of religious experience on the agenda. Today most students of religious and spiritual education lack appropriate experiences and show different opinions about what religion or spirituality could be. This setting raises several questions: How can religious experience be conceptualized in a context of religious plurality and secularity with the traditional religious traditions as just one option among others? How does lived religion contribute to such a conceptualization? Do the concepts of spirituality and implicit religion give way to a new understanding of religious experience? How can be grasped religious experience beyond the traditional religious practices? Do traditional empirical methods still fit? Which concepts and methods can we utilize in bringing religious experience into religious or spiritual education?

Annotation Ann Taves addresses the subject of religious experience directly and the problems of reductionism and humanistic fears of the sciences indirectly and by example. The orientation of this book is practical more than philosophical.

This book is written in answer to the common statement: "Studying and talking about religion may be well and good, but it's the experience that counts." The author takes a good look at the various types of religious experiences abroad in the world today and how they relate to interpretation and knowledge of the Christian faith. Can one know from experience? Can one argue from experience? How can one explain religious experiences which defy human interpretation? These are some of the questions dealt with in this informative book. --

HANDBOOK OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is generally recognized as the classic book on the psychology of religious experience. It is the gold standard against which other books in this field are measured. This monumental volume examines in great breadth and depth the nature, roots, ecology, expressions, explanations, and facilitational modes of religious experience. Ultimately, religious experience is central since it is the source, context, and validation of all religion, all religious activities, and all theories of religion. Scripture and sacrament are basically religious experiences. Religious experience is basically the encounter with God in its highest form.

This Element looks critically at the history and epistemology of religious experience and how the concept can be fruitfully expanded.

The Access to Religious Studies series offers a concise and readable introduction to the key areas of religious studies for students and the general reader. Religious Experience looks at the ways we can define religious experience and at religious experience as a basis for faith. It looks at religious experience within the major world religions and explores the role of mystery in religious practice along with the ways in which a sense of the supernatural is created in worship. The book compares the views of those who believe that religion centres around personal experience against those who believe that too great a stress on personal experience leads toward a spiritual elitism. Religious Experience includes quotations from primary sources, including sacred texts, suggestions for further reading, and practice questions for the various awarding bodies.

For many Christians, personal experiences of God provide an important ground or justification for accepting the truth of the gospel. But we are sometimes mistaken about our experiences, and followers of other religions also provide impressive testimonies to support their religious beliefs. This book explores from a philosophical and theological perspective the viability of divine encounters as support for belief in God, arguing that some religious experiences can be accepted as genuine experiences of God and can provide evidence for Christian beliefs.

The various ethnologists and anthropologists contributing to this volume focus on the "self"-perspective in relation to religion and spirituality: on how religiosity is personally thought, dreamt, imagined, created, felt, perceived and experienced, in its various subjective forms. The personal motive and practice in religion is here put to the front. One can see this perspective also reflected in today's society, in the ways people, most strongly in the West, are nowadays dealing with religion, religiosity or spirituality, often drifted far away from the institutional church organizations. As a deeply personal experience, it is amazing how little effort is undertaken in a scholarly way to put the personal reflections, utterings and experiences into words. A wide variety of personal religious or spiritual experiences, Christian and non-Christian, recent and historical, are now described and analysed in this fascinating volume. Clara Saraiva is a senior researcher at the Lisbon Institute for Scientific Tropical Research in Lisbon, a researcher of the Center for Research in Anthropology (cria) and a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Peter Jan Margry is Professor for European ethnology at the University of Amsterdam and Senior Research Fellow at Meertens Institute, KNAW , Amsterdam. Lionel Obadia is professor in anthropology at the University of Lyon. Kinga Povedak is assistant research fellow at the has Research Group on Religious Culture,at Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Jose Mapril is lecturer in Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon and a research fellow at CRIA - New University of Lisbon (Centre for Anthropological Research). (Series:?Ethnology of Religion, Vol. 1) [Subject: Religious Studies, Sociology, Anthropology]