This chapter shows the persistence of the imperial imagination in Baeck’s thought during the First World War, and his later critique of theological colonization during the Weimar Republic. When the Great War broke out, Baeck volunteered to serve as an army chaplain (Feldrabbiner), a position he held for almost the entire war period. Baeck’s sermons and writing from the front exemplify his view of the East as a space for colonization as well as his reading of the German military predicament as paralleling Jewish history. Baeck’s stature as a public intellectual rose during the Weimar Republic, but he also recognized a growing danger in the resurgence of the figure of second-century heretic Marcion, among others in the work of Adolf von Harnack, who called for a de-canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Baeck identified this tendency as central in the German theological and political imagination of the time. Against neo-Marcionite attempts to detach Christianity and Germany from Judaism and the Jews, Baeck offered a presentation of Judaism that stressed its place as the ethical foundation of Christianity. Only Judaism, Baeck insisted, could save Christianity from itself.

This chapter raises the problematic of mediation as illustrated through the schema of a finite seashell trying to capture an infinite ocean. After providing a provisional definition of “mediation,” I lay out my central approach to a solution: to shed light on how such mediation can work in general by exploring how it works in the particular case of the Eastern Christian icon.

In this chapter the account of the Idea of the Good as the foundation of moral realism is applied to issues in religion and politics (Section #1). The question is raised and answered why Plato is confident that the gods are only good and not ever bad (Section #2). The theology of Laws10 is examined for some of the theological implications of the preeminence of the Good (Section #3). The concept of religious experience is introduced and its metaphysical underpinnings explained (Section #4). The problem of evil is addressed: how can the Good, the archē of everything, be the cause of evil? If it is not the cause, whence evil? (Section #5). The tensions between a metaphysics of the Good and the exigencies of politics, especially the authority of rulership, is examined (Section #6). The idea of the common good is introduced in order to determine if it is possible that the common good and the private good should conflict and if so, how does this impact Plato’s universal Good (Section #7). The connection between political expertise, consent, and legitimacy of types of government is examined (Section #8)

As he developed his own faith, working it out as he lived and wrote, Tolstoy responded to varieties of religious experience and expression, including English ones. From early on, Tolstoy found in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and the novels of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others, information about English religious life and examples of how to novelize religious experience. In turn, when Tolstoy emerged, later in life, as a religious seeker and moral authority, English readers responded to Tolstoy both as a novelist and as a thinker.

From a formal theological point of view, it would be common to distinguish the experience I describe in Chapter 8 from revelation: it would be called ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ experience rather than revelation as such. However, if revelation is God's self-revelation, that is, if it is always personal, then that act of communication in relationship is always a self-revealing. For a Christian, if this is truly God's self-revealing, then the hermeneutic context of the Christian tradition will bring a degree of intelligibility to the experience. In Chapter 9, I consider this possibility through an examination of the spiritual tradition of Ignatius Loyola. Ignatius sets great store on experience as the place where one might find God. To ‘find God in all things’ is to reflect on where God has passed in experience. Ignatian discernment is about becoming attentive to feeling; I argue that this is not simply learning to be attentive to emotions but to be sensitive to moods as ways of experiencing God’s presence, although this distinction goes beyond the letter of the Ignatian text. Ignatius’ approach can be helpful for contemporary reflection because it is coextensive with everyday life.

The vast majority of people worldwide are religious, but religions are enormously diverse. Psychiatric research has attended more to the paths that people take in pursuit of the special things that religion represents than it has to religion itself. Religion is generally supportive of good mental health, and facilitates coping with illness and adversity, but religious and spiritual struggles (e.g., anger towards God, demonic attributions, religious conflicts, guilt and doubt) can impair mental well-being. Religious experiences, both positive and negative, can be mistaken for psychopathology and therefore need to be taken into account in diagnosis, but a differential diagnosis between spiritual/religious experience and mental disorder is not always helpful. It is possible both to be having a meaningful religious experience and to be suffering from a diagnosable mental disorder. Good clinical practice requires an ability to talk with patients in a sensitive and respectful way about their religious concerns.

Starting from a cognitive point of view, this paper provides an entirely new reading of the dances and chants of the Salian priests. By focusing on their dances and chants in the perspective of embodied cognition and by putting a diligent analysis of (a) the reports and (b) the prayer texts into historical comparisons with other ‘prophetic’ practices of that time, this study is able to elucidate the Salian performances as body techniques that go beyond a mere facilitation of sociality. These techniques alter the practitioners’ states of mind and thereby elicit an experience that one may call religious experience, divine experience, or ‘possession’.

This essay looks at the Christian context in which Britten lived and its impact on his work. When in 1940 he wrote that he was a member of a Christian nation, he could not have meant that Britain was a churchgoing nation, for most people were not active churchgoers. In fact, it would be necessary to go back to the seventeenth century to find a time when nearly everyone went to church. Britain was a Christian nation in the sense that its political, legal, ethical, and cultural life had been shaped by Protestant Christianity. By the 1920s this was a specifically English, rather than British, identity, for the disestablishment of the Welsh (1920) and Scottish (1921) churches, and the secession of the Irish Free State (1922) meant all three were intent on establishing their own distinctive identities and cultures. In mid-twentieth-century England, the Established Anglican Church, historically regarded as a ruling-class institution, remained closely associated with the monarchy and the state; thus, Anglican ritual governed public occasions and it was still regarded as part of an elitist and conservative Establishment.

In his well-known autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty observed two contrasting dispositions that he developed as a young boy. On the one hand, as the son of two radical, fellow-traveling Trotskyists, he absorbed a firm commitment to social justice and democratic politics. At the same time, as a solitary, even lonely child, living in rural isolation, he also had “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests,” such as an obsession with various species of wild orchids that grew near his home in northwest New Jersey. Much has been written about Rorty’s politics, about his “Trotsky” side. But relatively little has been said about his encounters with wild orchids, “Wordsworthean moments” in which he felt “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.” Rorty said “there is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthean moments.” Yet no one said less about these moments than Rorty himself; he seemed to slough them off. Why? My argument is that even acknowledging having had such moments (which he rarely did) seemed to him to pose a threat to his antifoundationalism, to his remarkably extreme view of human autonomy, and to his resolutely anti-authoritarian temperament. Alas.

This chapter looks at meditation and mindfulness and other forms of heightened awareness. It first looks at the evidence that meditation leads to both temporary and permanent changes in the brain, and has both short- and long-term benefits for physical and mental health. It asks: what then is the relation between mind and brain, and what is the direction of flow of causality? The chapter then looks at transcendental consciousness, and ‘better than normal states’. We focus in particular on religious experiences, and the involvement of the temporal lobes and other structures, as well as evaluating the evidence for the efficacy of Persinger’s ‘god helmet’. It mentions again entheogens, drugs that give religious-like experiences. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Buddhism, particularly Zen.

Drees examines a science-inspired naturalism that endorses a fully naturalistic view of reality, but does not exclude religious experience as a category of human experience. He considers some exceptional experiences that apparently conflict with natural events and experiences that coincide with affective responses, such as awe and wonder, proposing that the relevant exceptional experiences and affective experiences are explainable, at least in principle, within a naturalistic purview.

Wettstein examines religious experience from the ancient Jewish perspective of the book of Job, in particular its whirlwind passage where Job is left not with a full explanation of God's ways but instead with a poetic illumination of meaning. Job receives a vision from God that can free him from his own suffering by redirecting him to some joy-enhancing features of the world that also bears crushing evil unexplained by humans.