Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
December 17, 2020
Petter Grahl Johnstad
11 citations
Entheogen users report two distinct types of spiritual experience. One type resembles classic mystical experiences and is predicted by having a spiritual affiliation, motivation, and practice. The other type involves insight, positive feelings, and improved connections to others and nature, and is predicted only by spiritual motivation, not by affiliation or practices. These findings suggest competing conceptualizations of spirituality among users.
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
January 1, 2000
Frederic H. Peters
4 citations
The study of religion focuses on conscious experiences, but its methods cannot fully explain consciousness itself. Philosophy and psychology offer insights but lack access to the brain's neural mechanisms. Neuroscience has moved beyond behaviorism, and recent research suggests that the evolution of the brain's representational capacity may generate consciousness. These advances allow combining objective explanation with subjective descriptions, creating neurophenomenology. Lucid consciousness, a distinct state where awareness and content are differentiated, is a key category in Hindu and Buddhist traditions and serves as an ideal test case for this new analytic approach.
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
September 22, 2025
Alberto Cavallarin
2 citations
Neo-perennialists claim that a cross-cultural category of experiences can be defined as 'mystical.' The author clarifies this project and defends its feasibility, then criticizes the narrow focus on mystical experiences in neo-perennialist research—both in the dominant understanding of mystical states and the tendency to study them exclusively among altered states. The essay analyzes criteria external to the phenomenology of extraordinary experiences that might justify restricting a neo-perennialist account to certain mystical states. It closes by calling for a refined definition of 'mystical experience' and for expanding cross-cultural study of altered states beyond the mystical.
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
January 1, 2004
Frederic Peters
1 citation
Scholarly definitions of religion typically involve awareness of a supernatural dimension, a phenomenon found in virtually all human societies since paleolithic times. Advances in neuroscience show that phenomenal experience is identical to brain activity, raising the question of why an evolutionarily adapted brain generates a sense of the supernatural. Psychology identifies three primitive interpretive modules that produce a sense of causative essence, located in brain areas whose output is experienced as non-material, like thought. These neurophenomenal essences correspond to three forms of otherworldly spirit essence found across religious history, forming the basis of the supernatural sense.
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
June 24, 2025
Carole M. Cusack
The academic study of Esotericism emerged alongside Religious Studies and Sociology, with pioneering work in the 1970s by sociologists and historians of religion. The field proper began with Antoine Faivre's 1994 book Access to Western Esotericism. Over the following three decades, the field expanded and fragmented. The article argues that both Religious Studies and Esotericism Studies underwent a parallel shift: rejecting universalist typologies and text-based studies to focus on lived experience, establishing deconstructive relativism as the dominant mode. More recently, postmodern trends have given way to a retheorized realism that remains aware of researcher positionality and contested access to knowledge.