Phenomenology in Dialogue: Religious Experience and the Lifeworld
Friday, January 26 to Saturday, January 27, 2018
Hosting: Jesuit School of Theology, Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute, and Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA
Keynote speakers
Michael Barber, Saint Louis University
Sandra Schneiders, Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley
Phenomenology in Dialogue: Religious Experience and the Lifeworld is the topic of the regional conference of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience. The conference is divided into two main sections: critical issues in the phenomenological research of religious experience, and the phenomenology of religious experience in various domains of lifeworld, such as ministry, preaching, corporate world, ecology, health practices, and pastoral and clinical counseling.
In the first section we welcome contributions which advance research of religious experience by articulating the areas of special reflection, as well as the areas of new and visionary problematic. How do we thematize the problem of religious experience? How does the traditional phenomenological first-person authority play itself out in the phenomenology of religious experience? Should phenomenological research of religious experience be in dialogue with the natural science research? What are the spheres, regions and horizons in which we can understand religious experience? How do traditional topics of phenomenological philosophy, such as the ego, subjectivity, embodiment, or intersubjectivity, relate to the study of religious experience? We invite these and other questions to be treated not only in light of the classical phenomenological scholarship, but also within interpretive and critical approaches; and we also welcome contributions coming from the perspectives of theological phenomenology such as, for example, perspectives connected with the work of Schleiermacher or Troeltsch, French phenomenology, and the phenomenology of life.
In the second section, we would like to read papers which discuss the positioning of religious experience in various lifeworlds. How do religious realities manifest across the different traditions and practices? What regional ontologies of knowledge create the contexts for successful phenomenological research of religious experience? How can phenomenology clarify the role of religious experience in the world of business, in emergent theologies of hope, or in healthcare? The papers will be considered for further publication in the topical issue of De Gruyter Open Theology ( to be published in 2019).
For more information, please email conference@sophere.org