Understanding Religious Experiences: What the Bible Says About Spirituality

Today most people feel less interested in religion and more interested in spirituality. If you ask what they mean, they will tell you that organized religion tends to turn them off, but, nonetheless, they feel a hunger in the heart that they cannot seem to fill. They do not mean that they would rather have disorganized religion; they mean that institutional religion does not seem to satisfy their spirits and feel there must be something more, some better way of experiencing whatever that is for which they are hungry. Much new experimentation is going on as a result. Some of it is a search for the meaning to fill the soul and satisfy the spirit; much of it is a search for meaning on the spiritual level itself. Spirituality reaches always toward the question about the meaning of God, the meaning of relationships with others, the meaning of intimacy, and the meaning of soul gratifying insights into truth. Here, Ellens carefully and sensitively explores the full range of our spiritual natures and the variety of spiritual experiences of which we are capable, describing the way our souls and psyches work in our hunger and thirst for meaning. He explains in an enlightening and unconventional way why and how every human desires to reflect upon, learn, and share a heartfelt experience of God and of others.

J. Harold Ellens is a Research Scholar at the University of Michigan Department of Near Eastern Studies, a retired Presbyterian theologian, an ordained minister, a retired U.S. Army Colonel, and a retired Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology. He served 15 years as Executive Director of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies and was Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of theJournal of Psychology and Christianity. He has authored, co-authored, or edited 164 books, includingThe Destructive Power of Religion (Praeger, 2004) and Sex in the Bible (Praeger, 2006).