Spirituality in the Flesh: The Role of Discrete Emotions in Religious Life

Abstract

Recent research on the emotions provides significant new information concerning the bodily substrates of perception, cognition, and motivation. Such information promises new insights into a variety of religious phenomena. We might, for example, note how the emotion of fear frequently influences readers' response to apocalyptic literature and thereby becomes one source of the longer-lasting moods and dispositions we frequently discern in this distinctive religious outlook. A very different emotion, wonder, is similarly capable of affecting religious sensibilities as is evident in the life and writings of the environmental activist Rachel Carson. As these examples suggest, studying spirituality in the flesh is an important first step toward a truly interdisciplinary understanding of the embodied nature of religious thought and feeling.

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