Fits, Trances, and Visions: experiencing religion and explaining experience from Wesley to James - Softcover

Taves, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691010242 ISBN 13: 9780691010243

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Fits, trances, visions, speaking in tongues, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, possession. Believers have long viewed these and similar involuntary experiences as religious--as manifestations of God, the spirits, or the Christ within. Skeptics, on the other hand, have understood them as symptoms of physical disease, mental disorder, group dynamics, or other natural causes. In this sweeping work of religious and psychological history, Ann Taves explores the myriad ways in which believers and detractors interpreted these complex experiences in Anglo-American culture between the mid-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Taves divides the book into three sections. In the first, ranging from 1740 to 1820, she examines the debate over trances, visions, and other involuntary experiences against the politically charged backdrop of Anglo-American evangelicalism, established churches, Enlightenment thought, and a legacy of religious warfare. In the second part, covering 1820 to 1890, she highlights the interplay between popular psychology--particularly the ideas of "animal magnetism" and mesmerism--and movements in popular religion: the disestablishment of churches, the decline of Calvinist orthodoxy, the expansion of Methodism, and the birth of new religious movements. In the third section, Taves traces the emergence of professional psychology between 1890 and 1910 and explores the implications of new ideas about the subconscious mind, hypnosis, hysteria, and dissociation for the understanding of religious experience. Throughout, Taves follows evolving debates about whether fits, trances, and visions are natural (and therefore not religious) or supernatural (and therefore religious). She pays particular attention to a third interpretation, proposed by such "mediators" as William James, according to which these experiences are natural and religious. Taves shows that ordinary people as well as educated elites debated

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ann Taves is Professor of the History of Christianity and American Religion at the Claremont School of Theology and Professor of Religion at the Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America and Religious and Domestic Violence in Early New England: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbott Bailey.

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"The breadth of the book is truly remarkable, both across time and across perspectives. To move coherently from debates over the phenomena of the colonial Great Awakening to debates over both modern psychology of religion and early Pentecostalism, while at the same time moving back and forth between adepts and explainers of religious experiences is a real accomplishment."--Mark A. Noll, Wheaton College

"Taves offers both a history of American Protestant piety and a history of American psychology (in popular as much as academic modes). She creatively balances narratives of dramatic religious experience with varied naturalistic explanations that have been advanced since the Enlightenment. This is a grand enterprise--one of impressive breadth and seasoned scholarship."--Leigh Schmidt, Princeton University

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0691010242
• ISBN 13: 9780691010243
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar