Overview
- Argues in favor of returning Religious Studies to the exploration of religious experience, especially ecstatic experience
- Written from the perspective of an author who has done fieldwork in non-Western cultures
- Includes ecstasy in a variety of contexts, including religion, sexuality, drugs, music, and violence
Part of the book series: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism (INTERMYST)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book is a study of religious ecstasy, and the ways that it has been suppressed in both the academic study of religion, and in much of the modern practice of religion. It examines the meanings of the term, how ecstatic experience is understood in a range of religions, and why the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. June McDaniel examines how the search for ecstatic experience has migrated into such areas as war, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, drug use, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality. She argues that the loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects. She also proposes that the field of religious studies must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences. Both religious studies and theology need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.
Reviews
“This book does a great service to the field of religious studies. Certainly, the excessive emphasis in earlier scholarship on common experiences across religious traditions, often at the expense of the lived particularity of those traditions, was in need of correction. But it is equally certain that the result has been an overcorrection, with such a strong, exclusive emphasis in the study of religion today on difference and conflict that one often wonders if the humanistic spirit of scholarly inquiry has lost site of the very notion of a common humanity. Is it not in the service of humanity that the best inquiry occurs? Dr. McDaniel–with great care, clarity, and no small amount of humor–draws our attention back to the idea of religious experience, rebutting some of the more extreme forms of constructivism along the way. If the academy ignores this book, it will be to its detriment.” (Jeffrey D. Long, Professor of Religion and Asian Studies, Elizabethtown College, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
June McDaniel is Professor of the History of Religions at the College of Charleston, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Lost Ecstasy
Book Subtitle: Its Decline and Transformation in Religion
Authors: June McDaniel
Series Title: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92771-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-92770-1Published: 12 July 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-06512-6Published: 26 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-92771-8Published: 26 June 2018
Series ISSN: 2946-3270
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3289
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 325
Topics: Comparative Religion, Spirituality, History of Science, Religion and Psychology