Religion, Experience, and Narrative

Dear Colleagues,

The study of religion in terms of religious experience has intrigued scholars from a variety of disciplines. In the early twentieth century, the first methodology of a “science of religion”, phenomenology of religion, invoked “experience” as a significant research object. Subsequent criticism of phenomenological approaches also made this object suspicious. Attempts to rethink the study of religion included suggestions to replace “experience” by “discourse” and to study “culture” instead of “consciousness”. However, the resistance of this “obscure” concept of experience was remarkable, and eventually, it survived the death of the subject and some hegemonic aspirations of system or network analyses as well. The amazing ineradicability of this concept triggers ongoing discussions about the adequate conceptualization and study of experiences within the field of religious studies, enriching the methodological debates in this field. Following the phenomenological tradition, so-called anomalous or exceptional experiences (such as mystical experiences, psi-related experiences, visions, voices, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and experiences of possesion) are emphasized, and their study is linked to a concept of altered states of consciousness. A further elaboration of this research line culminates in a cognitive science approach that accentuates universal mental processes and their possible neurophysiological correlates. An alternative to this research direction has been inspired by the discursive approach in religious studies and stresses the importance of narratives for inspiring, shaping, structuring, understanding, and explaining religious experiences. The basic structure of having such an experience is assumed to be a narrative one, and processes of articulation, interpretation, and reflection related to interactions and communications are assumed to be crucial to identify and differentiate the meaningful whole of what is eventually understood as an experience from the first-person perspective.The narrative study of religious experiences links the varieties of these religious experiences to the varieties of individual biographies and sociocultural contexts.

In recent decades. the narrative approach has especially been adopted in order to study “religious identity” and “lived religion” with special attention to conversion experiences and illness experiences from an anthropological, psychological or sociological perspective.

This Special Issue invites contributions to the narrative study of the diversity of religious experiences, nonreligious experiences, spiritual experiences, transcendent experiences, sacred experiences, constellations of life experiences and religious ideas, etc. and their embedding in biographical, social, political or cultural contexts. In addition, methodological contributions to the defence, further elaboration or critique of a narrative approach or to a combination of the narrative approach with other approaches are also welcome. We hope that historical, empirical, and methodological studies will enhance our sensibility to the narrative pecularities of “experience” as an object of research in the humanities and in the social sciences and will question the increasingly common assumption that research on religious experiences must build on research in terms of the natural sciences.

Dr. Ulrike Popp-Baier
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• religion
• experience
• discursive approach
• narrative structure of experience
• diversity of religious experiences
• methodology of the narrative approach