Religious Sensations: Media, Aesthetics, and the Study of Contemporary Religion

In the study of religion, no one interested in the question of feelings can bypass the seminal work of the American philosopher and psychologist William James. James (1982: 42) circumscribed religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine”. Although James's attention to religious feelings and experiences is much to the point, it is also problematic for at least two reasons. First, his emphasis on feelings and experiences is predicated upon a strong distinction between the body, as the locus of senses and emotions, and the mind, as the site of intellectual knowledge. This distinction, which has had repercussions in the study of religion up to the present, reaffirms the Cartesian split between body and mind. Paying attention to religious feelings and experiences would then almost by necessity imply a disregard for more intellectual, rational dispositions (as if these would not also generate and sustain particular feelings and experiences). In my view, this is a vain, unproductive opposition, one that I seek to circumvent. 1