Ann Taves’ Religious Experience Reconsidered: A New Lens on Religious Studies

By Saad Ahmad, New Age Islam 20 May 2025 Redefining Religious Experiences With The Reference Of "Specialness" Major Points: 1. Taves explores religion’s role in shaping knowledge and social structures, using attribution theory to analyse how events are deemed religious, building the works by William James. 2. Specialness: Religious experiences are defined by their ascription of unique value, set apart from mundane activities, akin to Durkheim’s sacred. 3. Science and Religion: Taves advocates bridging humanities and natural sciences through psychological approaches to understand religious behavior. 4. Building-Block Approach: A methodological tool to deconstruct religious experiences into composite ascriptions, reducing the gap between disciplines. 5. Attempted to contextualize Shah Waliullah's contributions to the field of religious studies. ------ Ann, Taves, (2009) Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things, Princeton University Press, Princeton. ----- Introduction to the Book: For a student of social sciences and humanities, in shaping the kind of knowledge and establishing a social structure religion plays an important role. By engaging with the aspects of knowledge that keep society entangled with modern studies and research in more than one way, many disciplines have been developed. Among them, disciplines such as religious studies and Islamic studies are known for their commitment to studying religion in terms of its philosophical values, and in the case of the latter, creedal, cultural, and intellectual junctures provide a full context to the related studies. During the seventeenth century, philosophical and intellectual developments in the western world led to a new understanding of humanism. People were drawn to recognising things with new experiences in later historico-cultural ventures, often referred to as “modern,” which extracted energies from structural changes that occurred in our time and space. In this regard, at the height of modern times beginning with the 19th century, structural changes contributed to redefining the social and cultural realms in which ‘religions’ in general and ‘religion’ in particular became the subject of methodological treatment developed by Western scientific progress. Religion as a category fulfils the requirement of modern narrative and survives on the access of Protestant value and vision. However, religious experience attracts modern scholarships not only in terms of its divine connection with society but natural, psychological and scientific attempts to understand things of religion and different connotation of what was called “religious experiences” also matter. To understand the significance of religious experiences in our time, readings such as Varieties of Religious Experiences by William James and Hujjatullahi al-Baligha by Shah Waliullah helped contextualise religious experiences in more than one dominant way. In this context, during lectures at Madrasa discourses, the significance of ‘oceanic feeling’ was a subject of discussion in our interaction with professor Ebrahim Moosa. The term ‘oceanic feeling’ was borrowed from Freud’s work known as Civilisation and its discontent (1929), which refers to a limitless and boundless feeling as if it were oceanic. Freud’s context of oceanic feeling was revealed in correspondence with one of his pen pals, who questioned the sources of religiosity Freud had ever tried to debunk. Freud writes that the feeling he was encountering from his friend was a subjective fact. This feeling even keeps oneself to call religious and reject other beliefs as an illusion (Freud 2:2002). However, in response to our contemplative interaction that what makes religious experiences significant, Professor Moosa introduced scopes of religious experiences of every day in the writings of William James and Shah Waliullah (d. 1762). James is quite open to analysing the experiences that have a divine feeling. He extends his analysis to religions that seek links with non-divine belief too, for example, Emersonian optimism and Buddhist pessimism. While Shah Waliullah, professor Moosa explains, introduced such analogies in which philosophical, mystical and practical composition leading to a diverse Islamic experience provokes to learn a very complex and multi-layered knowledge. His attempt to combine such bits of knowledge not only for space and time in which Islamic ideals can flourish but also a developed view of Islamic metaphysics which assumably can shake the physical realities of today is highly acknowledged. However, this book is one of the rare contributions which tried to capture meanings and purposes of religious studies spanning over two centuries. Interested in a constructive element of religious studies, one should take discourses of the book in the continuation of the intellectual contribution ever written for narrating religious experiences. As domains of interpreting religion were the subject-matter of the hierarchical order and remained in a few hands, mystical elements hugely experimented in re-discovering the inner-experiences from a perspective of the religious mind. While hierarchical order and ritual demands controlled outer-experience of the religious brain. Not interfering into contentious issues of religion and its emotionally fragile web, Taves prefers attribution theory which outlines how people define events. She is thoughtful about that, in the process of defining events, how experiences are projected before any discourse. Attribution theory is based on the commonsensical causal explanations of religion. Following the line of Durkheim, Dewey, and Vries, Taves too believes that religion can be interpreted scientifically. For that matter, she finds herself interested in the idea of specialness, is what people get attracted to, Taves argued. This specialness is the essence of this book; it keeps one on more naturalistic grounds. Background Of The Book: Humanism is the central concern of Religious Experience Reconsidered. Through creative use of an interdisciplinary method, Taves tried to find answers within much reflected and academically well-interpreted aspects of the experience of religion. In the book, she argues that during the nineteenth century, scholars were interested in understanding experiences, thus, attempts to understand experiences spilled over into religious studies, including other related disciplines(p.3). While in the twentieth century, the experience of holy, sacred and numinous became subject of the scholarship of Rudolf Otto, Nathan Söderblom, and Friedrich Heiler and many others. Philosophers and scholars also followed this kind of trend in the East, such as Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan and many Buddhist liberals. Most of the Eastern liberals tried to reconnect traditional practises with modern understandings of authority. Thus, one norm in religious studies was to read it through authority in which traditional belief tried to connect with the modern agency of knowledge. For instance, the question of science, as Taves tried to underrepresent religious studies, became essential to modern reflectivity. Hence, in this remarkable study, one may seek scientific answers to the question of whether the brain and mind cause a different socio-cultural relationship with a person whose experiences are deemed religious. Keeping her readers informed about the philosophical developments behind the understanding of religion and religious studies, she relied more on method and tried to make the book a bit practical. Drawing from disciplines such as religious studies, anthropology, history, philosophy of science, psychology and neuroscience, she thinks that experiences can be studied from the perspective of biological phenomenon equally as a humanistic phenomenon. An attempt to read experiences from the perspective of biology can lead one to interpret them scientifically, while a humanistic interpretation of experiences pays more attention to subjective aspects. Taves has mentioned that she wants to read the naturalistic side of seemingly religious experiences. She thinks that we need to put a bit of religiousness or spirituality into the river called experiences; may increase the individual or collective quality of life and enable us to engage in worldly things. Her conceptual borrowings remind us to look at the relationship between modernity and materialism, which sometimes made Dewey explain it as “religious elements of experience” instead of religious experience. Thus, to read experiences, one may keep oneself off from absolutist claim that any experience deemed religious is religious only. Major Themes Of The Book: For many academicians, religion is the most potent activity ever to happen to a culture. It not only played an essential role in organising society but also maintained the social order. Thus, academicians and experts in religious studies considered religion a product of culture. In this regard, a few such as secular and atheist tendencies draw their argument on the logic that religion, in general means to control the society. Though such beliefs are reified by a historically evolutionary understanding of religion, which could be described as a secular interpretation of religious teleology, According to this understanding, religion is much like other cultural activities and has nothing special, even for Taves; religion is not that special if one looks at it from an evolutionary perspective, but when it comes to considering the phenomenon of specialness, religion becomes the heart of human activity. In following her analogy throughout religious history, Taves finds that the history of experiences, specifically religious ones, in which people’s attention was drawn to the significance of religion can open the scope of the comparative study of experiences in a different atmosphere. However, as the major theme of the book is studying experiences that are considered religious. It leads us to understand that how something in a culture becomes religious and how to trace human ascription and related things people consider themselves attached with. The ways of attachment are often categorised as spiritual, mystical, magical and religious. Studying experiences that are deemed religious and related terminologies separately can lead us to analyse the relationship between things considered religious and psychological, social, and cultural processes. Through the methodological tool of, for instance, the building-block approach, the gap between the humanities and sciences can be reduced. In that sense, the building block approach helps in creating composite ascriptions that are considered to be religions and spiritualities. Specialness: The idea of specialness is an absorptive term that, following the conceptual footmarks drawn by Durkheim (sacredness), is illustrated as “things set apart and protected by taboos” (p. 28). Taves’ use of specialness is for cultures with limited time to benefit from its general accessibility. For example, if religion is not considered special, there would not be ascription toward it. And after believing that religion is worth setting apart, which should be differentiated from everyday affairs of trading and selling, a unique sense of sovereignty comes into existence toward its adherents. Any violations in paying attention to its worth may cause turning special to ordinary, will destroy the meaning and use of religion itself. For Taves, specialness is an existential reality every day in the mammalian world as well, for example, in mother-infant relations. In human life too, if some relationship is considered inviolable, they ascribe more value to such relation associated with the object of inviolable than with no such associations (p.35). Science and Religion: Since Taves’ foremost concern remains bridging the gap between science and religion, science in itself is not religious (does not compromise in the matter of religion), hence it relies on physical realities, while religion, which is transcendental, has lesser affinities with physical reality. It relies on metaphysical truths. It is also argued that in order to make a link between science and religion, a psychological understanding of religion is necessary. However, Taves’ raises a question over an age-old convention within the academic universe of social sciences and humanities. For example, she argues that scholars of sociology, anthropology, and psychology might help bridge the gap between the humanities and the natural sciences. She is more critical about the trend within mainstream anthropology of religion, shamanism and spirit-possession, which is at the centre of anthropological research interest, the study of world religions especially Christianity is at the edge in anthropological feudal of research (p.6). Counting William James and his collaborators among those who considered spirit-possession and mediumship in the broader realm of religious experience but could not overcome the division of labour between religious and theological studies (p. 6), she argued that the psychology of religion had become a methodological tool for both social and natural sciences. It seeks to solve the question of whether religion is unique or can be used to explain behaviour in society. Thus, during the last three decades, interdisciplinarinism provided psychology and religion with a more open field, mostly in the fields of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy. Significance Of The Book: This book is a considerable contribution to the academic world, especially for those who intend to study religion through contemporary academic fields. It highlights the trends among disciplines in which mainstream aspects of religion remain on the sidelines, hence the need to keep religion at the centre of modern disciplines. By reconsidering religious experience, Taves informed us of how religious experiences were studied in the last two centuries and explained why her idea of specialness is crucial for adopting approaches to intercultural debates. In the book, she repeatedly reminds us to avoid opportunities of taking religion as a reductionist tool, whether within disciplines such as in anthropology or disciplines of natural sciences. However, the course of the book opens a window for people interested in interdisciplinary research between religious studies and the natural sciences. While going through debates in the book such as sui generis (religious experience is unique) and the ascriptive model (religious things are created when religious significance is assigned to them) for studying religion, the permanent question was how this book could be related to students of Madrasa discourses? Are we in a position to make a “building-block” approach? Since the social atmosphere of India and Pakistan highly relies on different normative contexts of religion, religious experiences of people are not only inter-cultural but transcultural and inter-civilisational? Such a situation enables us to contribute to the field of religious and theological studies in more creative ways and provide a direction to reconstructive academic ambitions emerging in a location such as India and Pakistan. Criticism: Despite receiving constructive impulses through this book and learning from the discourse of critique introduced in the book, the book was critiqued on various grounds. Thus, Taves thinks that the affairs of causality are experienced only through modern disciplines such as the humanities and natural sciences. Firstly, since, she hardly tried to deal with the definition of religion (p. xiii), her attempt to avoid the definitional problems of religion changed the academic scenario, which for so long relied on an intellectually fixed, culturally biased, and religiously emotional base of knowledge. Secondly, she is more inclined to the narratives that religion is the cultural construct is the analysis given by modern scholarship, has nothing to do with the debates of the inherently unique nature of religion. In case of introducing the debates of the book in societies predominantly Muslim that are updated through monotheistic theologies, instead of opening the gate to a humanistic vision across cultures, it will close the gate on constructive intercultural engagement. Thirdly, considering an ascriptive model of religion appropriate for interdisciplinary researches and studies could lead religion more a subject of manipulation primarily through newer studies and research about the psychology of religion and its impact over a socio-cultural atmosphere of the society. ------ Dr. Saad Ahmad, a JNU PhD graduate, is an accomplished academic who served as Assistant Professor at the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance and as Guest Faculty at the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, both at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He was also part of the Madrasa Discourses Project under the University of Notre Dame’s Contending Modernities initiative from 2017 to 2020. URL: https://www.newageislam.com/books-documents/ann-taves-lens-religious-studies/d/135588 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism