Religious Experience ─ A Reader

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.

Craig Martin is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College, New York and Executive Secretary of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. He is editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. Russell T. McCutcheon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. His areas of interest include the theories of myths and rituals, the history of the publicly funded study of religion in the US as well as the history and politics of the classification 'religion.' His major publications include Manufacutring Religion (Oxford University Press, 1997), Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (State University of New York Press, 2001) and The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (Routledge, 2003). Leslie Dorrough Smith is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at Avila University, Kansas City, Missouri. Much of her academic work focuses on the politics of sex, gender, and reproduction among religious conservatives. She has published several articles and book chapters on this topic as well as the scholarly portrayal of the Religious Right within the American academy.