Experiencing Religion ─ New approaches to personal religiosity

The various ethnologists and anthropologists contributing to this volume focus on the "self"-perspective in relation to religion and spirituality: on how religiosity is personally thought, dreamt, imagined, created, felt, perceived and experienced, in its various subjective forms. The personal motive and practice in religion is here put to the front. One can see this perspective also reflected in today's society, in the ways people, most strongly in the West, are nowadays dealing with religion, religiosity or spirituality, often drifted far away from the institutional church organizations. As a deeply personal experience, it is amazing how little effort is undertaken in a scholarly way to put the personal reflections, utterings and experiences into words. A wide variety of personal religious or spiritual experiences, Christian and non-Christian, recent and historical, are now described and analysed in this fascinating volume. Clara Saraiva is a senior researcher at the Lisbon Institute for Scientific Tropical Research in Lisbon, a researcher of the Center for Research in Anthropology (cria) and a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Peter Jan Margry is Professor for European ethnology at the University of Amsterdam and Senior Research Fellow at Meertens Institute, KNAW , Amsterdam. Lionel Obadia is professor in anthropology at the University of Lyon. Kinga Povedak is assistant research fellow at the has Research Group on Religious Culture,at Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Jose Mapril is lecturer in Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon and a research fellow at CRIA - New University of Lisbon (Centre for Anthropological Research).