Religions
September 26, 2023
Claudio Campesato
Amalarius of Metz, an early medieval author, argued that liturgical music and singing produce a physical and emotional effect that goes beyond simply evoking emotions. In his work Liber Officialis, he described how listening to music creates a “spiritual state” of nakedness of the heart, making a person receptive to tears and sensitive to God’s voice. This represents a shift from the earlier patristic idea of compunction (penthos), where tears in prayer were linked to sorrow for sins and liturgical music was seen as an obstacle. For Amalarius, music’s natural power (vis) moves a person to a receptive state that prepares the soul to welcome the Word of God, leading to conversion and fruitful listening.
Religions
July 20, 2023
Sophie-Anne Perkins
Sixteen Western Vajrayāna Buddhist practitioners described contextual, epistemic, ethical, personal, practical, religious, and socio-cultural factors that challenged their ability to learn and engage in deity yoga, along with strategies they used to overcome those challenges. These factors have been largely overlooked by empirical meditation research, yet their relevance to practice efficacy, outcomes, and adverse experiences is now recognized. The testimonies also reveal that the cross-cultural transmission of Vajrayāna Buddhism involves adaptation and negotiation of practice approaches and environments to fit lay practitioners' needs, while meaning is synthesized from experiences with teachers, teachings, and tantric practice.
Religions
June 27, 2023
Antti Piilola
Ineffability—the quality of being beyond words—has long been central to philosophy of religion and mysticism. In apophatic theology, it safeguards divine transcendence by placing God beyond human concepts. It also defines mystical experience, either affirming its unique nature or challenging it as incoherent and paradoxical. This article explores whether a single notion of 'Being Ineffable' can unite mystical experience and its transcendent object while acknowledging the coherence problem. The author constructs an argument for absolute ineffability as the convergence of three meanings: as a definition of absolute ineffability, as a mystical experience of it, and as the Ineffable itself (God, the Absolute, the Ultimate). The argument attempts to transform ineffability from a negation into a necessary affirmation.
Religions
September 14, 2022
Leslie Ann King
Christian congregations struggling with polarized cultural environments and spiritual challenges from entrenched differences can benefit from the Pantañjali yogic system. This system offers Reformed Christian communities a way to develop yoga practices that integrate breath, movement, and appropriate Biblical texts. Three practice plans are provided. The honorable appropriation of yoga by a Christian community promises an integrative method and a spacious experience for practitioners, potentially enabling them to influence their faith community toward such relevant spaciousness.
Religions
August 19, 2022
Paul Slama
Modern metaphysics is the history of making transcendence immanent, a process visible in the concept of the 'idea of god.' This idea violently separates subjectivity from transcendence, creating a 'psycho-theological' tear: the divine leaves a trace in us through its very distance. The argument is traced through four archives: Descartes' third Meditation, Kant's refutation of the cosmological proof in the Critique of Pure Reason, Schelling's commentary on Kant, and Levinas' work.
Religions
October 10, 2025
Peter Mark Tyler
A practicing psychotherapist proposes a 'mystical therapy' by weaving together three traditions: the Christian mystical tradition of theologia mystica, modern psychotherapy from Freud through James Hillman and Wilfred Bion, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical ideas about the mystical and the distinction between saying and showing. Drawing on three decades of clinical work, the author argues that these strands can be blended to re-boot the mystical tradition for contemporary seekers.
Religions
March 27, 2024
Christine S. Vanpool
Between AD 1200 and 1450, shamans in the Casas Grandes region used tobacco and possibly other entheogens to enter trance states, enabling their spirits to travel across the cosmos. These trance experiences involved vertigo and soul flight, common cross-culturally and consistent with nicotine intoxication. Shamans interacted with other-than-human beings, including macaw- and serpent-linked deities, and used animated objects such as Playas Red and Chihuahuan Polychrome pottery effigies of humans, macaws, and snakes. These pots, proposed as animate “pot-people,” featured designs emphasizing spinning and vertigo, central to soul flight. Some pots were literally spun, as evidenced by wear patterns on their bases, reflecting sympathetic and mimetic magic linking them to the spirit world.
Religions
July 25, 2023
Dominika Ruszkiewicz
Chaucer's poem The House of Fame draws on an ancient philosophical exercise called 'the view from above,' which uses imagination to help a person review their life and place it within the context of universal nature. The poet adapts the motif of celestial flight not to promote contempt for the world, as some writers do, but to align with thinkers like Marcus Aurelius who use it for self-reflection. Chaucer's treatment of the view from above topos validates the imagination's role in achieving self-knowledge and awareness of one's position in the cosmos.
Religions
June 27, 2023
Matteo di Placido, Stefania Palmisano
Yoga in twenty-first-century Italy is neither entirely new nor a clear alternative to established religions, but instead shares overlapping boundaries with Catholicism, contemporary spiritualities, and Western esoteric traditions such as theosophy and anthroposophy. Drawing on a discursive study of religion approach, the authors construct a preliminary genealogy of yoga in Italy that reveals its premodern, esoteric, and theosophical roots. They question the novelty often attributed to contemporary spiritualities and show how yoga's positioning within the Italian religious field involves porous and overlapping concepts. The article reflects on the limits of sociocultural theorizing for interpreting the spiritual and religious field.
Religions
April 27, 2023
Anja L. Winter, Pehr Granqvist
Attachment theory can help explain how people think about religion and spirituality in bodily, physical ways—through metaphors, rituals, and imagining God or spirits as attachment figures. Embodied cognition also plays a role in mystical experiences and altered states, whether inside or outside religious settings. The term religiospiritual cognition is proposed to capture this broader view. The paper reviews attachment theory, connects it to embodied religious and spiritual thought, and suggests future research directions. Psychedelic science is highlighted as a promising area for studying how attachment relates to embodied religiospiritual cognition.
Religions
November 2, 2022
Ismail Lala
The most influential Sufi thinker in Islam, Ibn ʻArabī, views mystical experience and revelatory knowledge, called 'spiritual unveiling' (kashf), as a form of continuing divine revelation given to saints. As the self-proclaimed 'Seal of Saints', he derives legal rulings from mystical experience, not just from textual sources. He emphasizes the inner aspect of worship and extracts legal rulings from visions, such as determining that hands should be raised during formal prayer because the Prophet Muḥammad commanded him in a mystical vision. This reveals the epistemic status of mystical experience and its interplay with textual evidence in his thought.
Religions
October 21, 2022
Mona Jahangiri
During meditation, the brain undergoes changes that neuroscientists like Andrew Newberg link to self-transcendent experience (STE) or Absolute Unitary Being (AUB), which resemble mystical experiences across faiths. This paper examines the Islamic mystical concept of fanāʾ (annihilation of self) through the Qurʾānic story of Moses seeking to see God, falling unconscious from awe, and attaining a new consciousness. It aims to connect neuroscience with the mystical feeling of union with God, investigating whether spiritual experiences such as Moses' can be measured neuropsychologically. The paper presents different consciousness models and asks whether Newberg's STE or AUB theory equates to fanāʾ, and which psychological experience applies to Moses.
Religions
December 5, 2020
Pavel Nosachev
The television series Supernatural constructs a new theology by blending Christian demonology with occult and charismatic Protestant ideas. Drawing on C. Partridge's theory of occulture and U. Eco's semiotic narrative model, the article argues that the show's popularity stems from its bricolage of Western personified evil with abstract Eastern spirituality. Over 15 seasons, Supernatural evolved from a story of two brothers hunting evil into a global panorama of demonology, angelology, and eschatology, engaging themes of theodicy and the nature of God. The show's narrative draws on third-wave charismatic spiritual warfare theology and Emmanuel Swedenborg's occult system. The author concludes that classical monotheistic mythology, in both orthodox and heterodox forms, remains highly attractive to modern audiences, and occulture makes it flexible enough to meet diverse demands.
Religions
October 31, 2020
Arpita Mitra
Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa's religious orientation is best understood as Vedāntic but not sectarian or exclusive. He used different states of consciousness to explain varying attitudes toward the Divine, harmonizing diverse streams within Vedānta. He taught that as long as one has I-consciousness, one operates within the jurisdiction of śakti and must accept it as real; only in the state of samādhi, where I-consciousness disappears, is there neither One nor many. The article argues that Rāmakṛṣṇa was probably not as distant from the Advaita Vedānta philosopher Ādi Śaṁkara as previously claimed.
Religions
April 18, 2018
Pavel Nosachev
The article examines how Western esotericism shapes computer game plots, using the game "Gray Matter" by J. Jensen as a case study. Jensen employs occultural bricolage, mixing elements from Stephen King, the Society for Psychical Research, parapsychology, and neuropsychology. The game presents three competing explanations for paranormal events: a magician who denies the supernatural, a neurobiologist who sees mind as objectifiable energy, and a psi-specialist who affirms super-abilities and an afterlife. The authors argue that Jensen promotes the last perspective, making it the game's central thesis.
Religions
November 3, 2017
Lee Irwin
Reincarnation theories in America have evolved from the 1680s to the present, drawing from Native American traditions, Western Esotericism, Christianity, Judaism, missionary Hinduism and Buddhism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Rosicrucianism. Current theories increasingly rely less on religious support and more on direct personal experience, paranormal research, and new therapeutic models. The paper surveys these historical currents and concludes with reflections on the complexity of reincarnation theory, raising questions about its future development.