Assessing Theoretical Approaches to “Religious Experience” and Their Theological Significance
The practices of religious traditions contribute to processing human experiences in different ways: Sometimes by engendering experiences, sometimes by contributing to interpreting experiences as religious. By analyzing various established positions on so-called religious experience, Henriksen’s book contributes fresh analyses of these positions and approaches them by combining a hermeneutical and pragmatist approach. He develops an argument that focuses on the need to consider experiences processed by religion from both a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. He argues for a non-reductionist, naturalist approach to these without eliminating their potential theological significance. Against the backdrop of the discussions about established scholarly positions, Henriksen also provides some concrete empirical examples that partly elucidate and partly challenge these. Thus, the book contributes to the ongoing debate about how to discuss experiences people understand as having religious significance.
