2017 Phenomenology of Religious Experience

Topical Issue of Open Theology, Volume 3, Issue 1 (Dec 2017)

PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

(ed. Olga Louchakova-Schwartz/Courtenay Crouch)

In this issue, the editors present problematic of religious experience in philosophy and phenomenology, as related to massive evidence of religious experiencing in esotericism, mysticism, and experience-based theologies. An novel approach to the study of religious experience suggests integration of multiple phenomenological perspectives which, instead of creating interdisciplinary constraints, illumine religious intuition with regard to its positioning in different horizons of inquiry. Religious experience appears as generating its own lifeworld which can be further subjected to constitutive analyses in any of its forms, such as static (i.e., structural), genetic (temporal), and generative (historical) analysis. This framework further develops towards the idea of the regional ontology of the holy unifying conditions of possibility for religious experience which manifest themselves across different domains and spheres of consciousness. It is possible that the lifeworld of the everyday would be “masking” the Holy while the Holy can be spontaneously “unmasking” itself, that is, coming out of anonymity in instances of religious experiencing. In oral transmission and traditional texts, religious experience is deployed from interiority into intersubjectivity. The forms of religious experiencing add up (not unlike adumbrations in Husserl’s view of sensory objects) thereby creating a picture of the essence of religious experiencing on the whole.

INSIDE:

Religious Experience, Adumbrated: Towards a Phenomenological Ontology of the Region

Louchakova-Schwartz, Olga / Crouch, Courtenay

Religion and the Appresentative Mindset

Barber, Michael D.

Phenomenology and the Possibility of Religious Experience

Mercer, Ronald L.

Phenomenology’s Rejects: Religion after Derrida’s Denegations

Alvis, Jason W.

The Sound of a Small Whisper: Ordinary Religious Experience

Kugelmann, Robert

Modest Reflections on the Term ‘Religious Experience’