Taves examines some approaches from the psychology of religion to religious experience, focusing on the psychology of religion as represented by researchers associated with the International Association for the Psychology of Religion and the American Psychological Association’s Division 36. She suggests that psychology of religion can treat its subject matter of religious experience as an object in its own right or as something related to another important state, such as depression.

There has been much debate over whether New Age spirituality (NAS) is a useful category and, if so, how best to characterize the phenomena clustered under that heading. Historically minded scholars generally agree, however, on the value of distinguishing between narrower and broader uses of the term “new age”! In the narrower sense, it refers above all to ideas in the writings of post-Theosophist Alice Bailey (1880–1949), which were picked up by the new age networks of the 1950s, many of them UFO related, and transformed into a more activist form by 1960s utopian communities, most notably Findhorn. Te movement, narrowly conceived, was British-based and relied upon occultist traditions that had long been influential there (Melton 1995; Sutcliffe 2003a; Albanese 2007; Hanegraaff 2009: 345). In a more general sense, scholars have used “new age” as a catch-all term for the much more extensive and complex “cultic milieu” of the 1980s and beyond, which was dominated “by the so-called metaphysical and New Tought traditions typical of American alternative culture” (Hanegraaff 2009: 344–5). Sutcliffe depicts this as “a popular hermeneutical shift in the meaning of ‘New Age’ … [such that] at the turn of the 1970s, … ‘New Age’ as apocalyptic emblem of the near future gave way to ‘New Age’ as humanistic idiom of self-realisation in the here-and-now” (Sutcliffe 2003a: 5).

Max Weber's (1978) Economy and Society embeds religion, or, more precisely, religious behaviour in a sociology of social action, grounded in the subjective meaning that actors implicitly or explicitly attach to their behaviour. Although his approach is sometimes referred to as “interpretive sociology”, Weber was equally concerned with interpretation and explanation (1978: 4—5). He began with action as understood from the point of view of the actor or actors, then sought to situate it within “an understandable sequence of motivation”, taking into account a range of factors (e.g. biological, psychological, social, environmental), many of them outside of subjective awareness and largely devoid of conscious meaning. He then attempted to determine the relative weight of the various factors in relation to the action in question. He assumed that hypotheses regarding the weight that should be assigned to various causal factors required testing. In some cases, hypotheses could be tested by means of psychological experimentation, and in others through statistical analysis of large data sets. In still others, “there remains only the possibility of comparing the largest possible number of historical or contemporary processes which, while otherwise similar, differ in the one decisive point of their relation to the particular motive or factor the role of which is being investigated. This [Weber argued] was the fundamental task of comparative sociology” (ibid.: 9—10).

A professor of American religion and Catholic studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ann Taves's areas of expertise include the study of Catholicism, “tradition” as a category of analysis, and psychological and experiential models of religion, among others. As a scholar also concerned with methodological and theoretical issues in the study of religion, Taves has written and lectured extensively on historical understandings of religious experience and its resultant impact on Christian theology, the relationship between cognitive science and the study of religion, and theorizing involuntary experiences (such as spirit possession). Her book publications include Religious Experience Reconsidered (2009), The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (1986) and Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (1999), from which the following essay is excerpted.

Fits, Trances, and Visions is a historical study of some of the most dramatic and controversial ecstatic experiences in America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including trances, mesmerism, tongue-speaking, and faith-healing, among others. Understanding the significance that the term “experience” carries within the study of religion, Taves argues that one cannot understand religious experience—or any experience, for that matter—outside of the context in which that experience takes place. She privileges William James's view that attempting to view a phenomenon outside of its context is a lost analysis, for the extracted phenomenon is rendered dead inasmuch as it is robbed of the very components that made it socially meaningful.

Given that religion, religious, and religions are Western folk concepts, that their meaning is unstable and contested, and that they cannot be defined so as to specify anything uniquely, we need to consider broader, more generic ways of characterizing the sorts of things that interest us as scholars of religion. Rather than relying on emically loaded first-order terms, such as sacred, magical, spiritual, mystical, or religious, we can seek ways to translate the disciplinary second-order discourse of religion, religious, and religions into broader, more generic terms when designing research. Instead of stipulating a definition for a key first-order term, such as “religious,” and, thus, defining in advance what exactly will count as such, I propose – to borrow a fishing metaphor – that we cast our nets more broadly and then sort through the variety of things that our nets pull in. Identifying a broader set of nets that we can use – singly or in combination – to specify what it is we want to study would not only eliminate the confusion between first- and second-order use of the term “religious,” it would also highlight the impossibility of uniquely specifying what is meant by the first-order terms and force us to specify what it is about this constellation of concepts that most interests us.

SPECIALNESS AS A GENERIC ATTRIBUTE OF THINGS CONSIDERED RELIGION-LIKE

The idea of specialness is one broader, more generic net that captures most of what people have in mind when they refer to sacred, magical, spiritual, mystical, or religious, and then some. We can consider specialness both behaviorally and substantively, asking whether there are behaviors that tend to mark things off as special and whether there are particular types of things are that are more likely to be considered special than others.