Beyond Mysterium Tremendum: Thoughts toward an Aesthetic Study of Religious Experience

Abstract

Much sociological ethnography of religion values an objective distance between observer and subject to the point of reducing religion to a catalogue of doctrines and rituals, failing all the while to take seriously the subjective experiences of believers and the experiences of ethnographers themselves. The association of religious experience with transcendent feelings of awe or ecstasy, coupled with the methodological impossibility of perfect empathy, further drives the ethnography of religion away from the consideration of religious experience. I offer thoughts toward an aesthetics-oriented method of studying lived religiosity, whereby the ethnographer becomes sensitive to aspects of religious experience that are precognitive but not necessarily spiritual.

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