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.