Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Gerhard van den Heever
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Force Fields ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Introductory Essay ◽  
The Way

In this introductory essay to the theme issue “Intersections of Discourses – Pliable Body, the Making of Religion, and Social Definition,” we sketch the main contours of thinking about human bodiliness in religion. This relates both to the way in which bodies and ways of bodiliness feature in religious discourse and practice but also to the way in which scholarly theorising deal with human bodies in religion. Our argument is based on two main points of departure, namely that bodies are constructed products of discourse and that “religion” is a set of somaticising practices. After a long neglect, the body was rediscovered as a core topic for religious studies in the wake of four intersecting force fields, namely the interest in human bodies in anthropology and sociology, the intellectual legacy of Michel Foucault, the emergence of spirituality as lived religion, and interest in religious experience as study field. In sum, it is argued that the essays presented here constitute a reminder that religious discourses are not languages “out of this world”, but are very much human languages effecting human intentional (and unintentional) outcomes in interactional social and cultural settings.

Pain and Religious Experience: Theory and Methods

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Glucklich
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Quantitative Method ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Qualitative Interpretation ◽  
Constructivist Approaches ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way that the hurting body enhances, deepens, and informs religious experience. It begins by examining the contested category of religious experience, contrasting the essentialist with the constructivist approaches. Both are complicated by consideration of embodiment—specifically, of the body in pain. Two concrete cases of religious pain, or sharp discomfort, are discussed as illustrations of a qualitative approach to studying pain and religious experience. This method is evaluated against two examples of a quantitative method. The article concludes that a qualitative interpretation of the meaning, rather than the analysis of causes, of religious hurting are superior, within specified parameters. Finally, the qualitative method requires an exposition that takes the form of a narrative in which the researcher acts as a close observer–participant.

Knowing Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-122
Author(s):  
James W. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Relational Model ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
The Way

Taking embodiment seriously impacts the way religion is theorized in the discipline of cognitive psychology and in other religious studies disciplines, including theology. This chapter describes new avenues of research that follow from adopting an embodied perspective. An embodied perspective also transforms the way we think about traditional topics concerning religious knowledge. The often argued parallel between ordinary perceptual experience and certain religious experiences commonly described as religious perceptions is analyzed and an appreciative critique of William Alston’s 1991 book Perceiving God is offered. Arguments for conceiving of religious experience as a form of perception are strong but the argument as currently framed is seriously flawed psychologically. Reframing the argument in terms of an embodied-relational model strengthens it and supports the argument in this book that reason is on the side of those who choose a religiously lived life.

scholarly journals When bodies think: panpsychism, pluralism, biopolitics

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Martin Savransky
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
William James ◽  
The Body ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Participatory Medicine ◽  
Gain Access ◽  
The Way

Cultivating a speculative orientation to the medical humanities, the aim of this essay is to explore some dimensions of the recent calls for more participatory forms of medicine and healthcare under the sign of what, after Michel Foucault, I call the ‘biopolitical problematic’. That is, the divergent encounter between techniques of biopower that seek to take hold of life and the body, and a plurality of living bodies that persistently respond, challenge and escape its grasp. If critics of ‘participatory medicine’ have warned that the turn to ‘participation’ in healthcare functions as a form of biopower that seeks to gain access to bodies, and in so doing take a better hold of life, in this essay, I propose we experiment with the question of what kinds of conceptual tools may be required to make perceptible the ways in which a plurality of participating bodies may become capable of responding, challenging and escaping ‘participation’s’ grasp. After problematising the ontology of participation involved in contemporary debates around participatory medicine, I draw on the work of William James and Alfred North Whitehead, among others, to argue for the need to reclaim a pluralistic panpsychism—in short, the proposition that all things think—as a pragmatic tool to envisage the possibility of a plurality of thinking bodies capable of unruly forms of participation all the way down.

Psychology of Religion

1997 ◽  
pp. 51-58
Author(s):  
O. Karagodina
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Psychology Of Religion ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Religious Studies

Psychology of religion as a branch of religious studies, in contrast to the philosophy and sociology of religion, focuses attention mainly on the problems of individual religiosity - the phenomena of religious experience, religious beliefs, mechanisms of the emergence and development of religious experience. The psychology of religion studies the experience of the supernatural person, the psychological roots of this experience and its significance for the subjective. Since a person is formed and operates in a society, the study of religious experience must include its social sources.

Formative Influences

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Radner ◽  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Film Analysis ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Christian Metz ◽  
The Way

In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.

First as Sociology, Then as Geography

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-43
Author(s):  
Justin Tse
Keyword(s):  
Social Geography ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Geography ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Ideological Work ◽  
The Way

This essay reviews Steven J. Sutcliffe and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus's New Age Spiritualities: Rethinking Religion. It shows that their attempt to redefine religion through new age spiritualities is actually an attempt to impose an economically elite social geography onto religious studies as a social fact. My central argument is that this effort in turn reveals that religious studies serves as a sociological factory for liberal economic ideologies. It suggests that to mitigate this ideological work, a shift toward critical geography in religious studies is the way forward.

When Is a Religion Like a Weed?

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 10-18
Author(s):  
Nathan Rein
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Study ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
The Way

Caroline Schaffalitzky de Muckadell's 2014 article, "On Essentialism and Real Definitions of Religion," offers a comprehensive rationale for the use of real, essentialist definitions of religion in the field of religious studies. In this article, I examine her arguments and the proposed definition she supplies. I argue that a close reading of Schaffalitzky's piece, concentrating especially on the way she uses examples, helps to demonstrate that she and her anti-essentialist opponents view the field of religious studies in incommensurable ways. While Schaffalitzky views definitions as serving the analytical study of religion as an object, her opponents view definitions primarily rhetorically and seek to focus attention on the process of defining.

scholarly journals Mobilizing the Sense of “Fat”: A Phenomenological Materialist Approach

Human Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Slatman
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
The Way ◽  
Phenomenological Exploration

AbstractThis paper aims to mobilize the way we think and write about fat bodies while drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body. I introduce Nancy’s approach to the body as an addition to contemporary new materialism. His philosophy, so I argue, offers a form of materialism that allows for a phenomenological exploration of the body. As such, it can help us to understand the lived experiences of fat embodiment. Additionally, Nancy’s idea of the body in terms of a “corpus”—a collection of pieces without a unity—together with his idea of corpus-writing—fragmentary writing, without head and tail—can help us to mobilize fixed meanings of fat. To apply Nancy’s conceptual frame to a concrete manifestation of fat embodiment, I provide a reading of Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger (2017). In my analysis, I identify how the materiality of fat engenders the meaning of embodiment, and how it shapes how a fat body can and cannot be a body. Moreover, I propose that Gay’s writing style—hesitating and circling – involves an example of corpus-writing. The corpus of corpulence that Gay has created gives voice to the precariousness of a fat body's materialization.

Discipline

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 183-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan S. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Medical Regimen ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Or Economics ◽  
The Mind

There are broadly five interconnected meanings of the noun ‘discipline’. Disciplinawere instructions to disciples, and hence a branch of instruction or department of knowledge. This religious context provided the modern educational notion of a ‘body of knowledge’, or a discipline such as sociology or economics. We can define discipline as a body of knowledge and knowledge for the body, because the training of the mind has inevitably involved a training of the body. Second, it signified a method of training or instruction in a body of knowledge. Discipline had an important military connection involving drill, practice in the use of weapons. Third, there is an ecclesiastical meaning referring to a system of rules by which order is maintained in a church. It included the use of penal methods to achieve obedience. To discipline is to chastise. Fourth, to discipline is to bring about obedience through various forms of punishment; it is a means of correction. Finally there is a rare use of the term to describe a medical regimen in which ‘doctor's orders’ brings about a discipline of the patient. In contemporary society, there is, following the work of Michel Foucault, the notion of increasing personal regulation resulting in a ‘disciplinary society’ or a society based upon carceral institutions.

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