Religious Experience: A Reader (Critical Categories in the Study of Religion)

Religious Experience: A Reader offers a succinct collection of essays, along with an authoritative general introduction and detailed introductions to each essay, and will be of use in senior undergraduate and graduate classes. After providing background readings on the history and uses of the category experience, this volume pairs classic with contemporary examples of scholarship that presumes religion to be based on experiences that are socio-politically autonomous and therefore universal. Taking this viewpoint as its data, the anthology then moves readers to examine experience as part of a social rhetoric that can be studied in terms of its practical effects and its ability to authorize social identities. The collection therefore moves readers from the seemingly common-sense and widely held notion that religious experience corresponds to some universal sentiment (often thought to comprise a key element to human nature) to entertaining that the discourse on religious experience is itself a public technique used in acts of social formation.