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This book examines the rise and demise of the psychology of religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and the United States. It considers the formation of the psychology of religion as an international movement, an enterprise whose goal was to refashion the science of religion at the turn of the century. Drawing on published sources and archival accounts, the chapters engage with the work of notable figures including William James, C.G. Jung, and Pierre Janet, placing it alongside lesser-known practitioners such as Ernest Murisier, James Henry Leuba, James Pratt, and George Albert Coe. In addition to probing the intellectual background and professional context for the emergence of this sub-discipline, the book examines the development of key concepts and methodologies among psychologists of religion and offers arguments both for the rise of the discipline as well as for its demise in the early decades of the 20th century.
"William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known are the medical fixations that united his multiple identities and drove his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and soul. William James, M.D. offers an account of the development and cultural significance of James's ideas and works, and establishes, for the first time, the relevance of medical themes to his major lines of thought. James lived at a time when old assumptions about faith and the moral and religious possibilities for human worth and redemption were increasingly displaced by a concern with the medically "normal" and the pe...
The Thought at the Back of the Mind is a plea for the centrality of the humanities as a vehicle of knowledge about ourselves and about the reality around us. It illustrates the interpretative arts through Aronowicz’s close reading of Charles Péguy, Don DeLillo, Bernard d’Espagnat, Wysława Szymborska, and Marilynne Robinson. Each author exhibits a complex relationship to the narratives emanating from the sciences—wonder, terror, appreciation, resistance. All, in different ways, point to a dimension of the human that cannot be captured through “the scientific method.” For the most part, they make their points not through abstract argument but through an exploration of daily life. Each writer gives pride of place to metaphor, humor, and/or intuition as indispensable conduits to the reality within and without us. The Thought at the Back of the Mind explores the religious dimension embedded in the narratives emanating from the natural sciences as well as in the quest to formulate what eludes them. These two contrary dimensions of our relation to the sciences, in their various configurations, reveal us to ourselves in our historical moment.
This book explores the textual traditions that authorize the history, legitimacy, and authenticity of today’s physical posture practice. The volume focuses on why and how yoga communities have adopted various texts that they consider sacred or spiritually meaningful. Among the texts discussed are Yogananda‘s Autobiography, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Upanishads, the Vedas, and the Yoginī Tantra. Famous thinkers included are Aurobindo, Yogananda, Osho-Rajneesh, Sogyal Rimpoche, Charles Johnston, and Howard Thurman. Offering a starting point, the ten chapters address the nature, selection, and function of various anci...
Retired Missionaries and Faith in a Changing Society offers a sociological study of the Irish missionary diaspora. It draws on a series of interviews with female and male Catholic missionaries, mainly nuns and priests, who have worked in Asia, Africa and Central and South America, and who have returned to live in Ireland. The chapters provide unique insight into their experiences, exploring how they have navigated life-course changes in the context of changing church and changing societies. Retired missionaries have several vantage points from which to communicate their understandings, having worked across cultures and encountered some of the most challenging global social problems. Respondi...
Demons in the USA argues that the discourse on the demonic that developed in the nineteenth century continues to exert a powerful hold over the American spiritual imagination. The book begins by tracing the conservative Christian encounter with Spiritualism in the nineteenth century and the mode of thinking about the demonic which developed. As Spiritualism’s core principles reappeared in the New Age, Christian interlocutors once more drew on this "anti-Spiritualist" paradigm to condemn the movement. This condemnation is absorbed by and amplified through the film The Exorcist. The author considers how the success of the film disseminates the anti-Spiritualist paradigm in surprising ways, e...
A definitive history of mescaline that explores its mind-altering effects across cultures, from ancient America to Western modernity Mescaline became a popular sensation in the mid-twentieth century through Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, after which the word “psychedelic” was coined to describe it. Its story, however, extends deep into prehistory: the earliest Andean cultures depicted mescaline-containing cacti in their temples. Mescaline was isolated in 1897 from the peyote cactus, first encountered by Europeans during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. During the twentieth century it was used by psychologists investigating the secrets of consciousness, spiritual seekers from A...
Jung’s lectures on the history of psychology—in English for the first time Between 1933 and 1941, C. G. Jung delivered a series of public lectures at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Intended for a general audience, these lectures addressed a broad range of topics, from dream analysis to yoga and meditation. Here for the first time in English are Jung’s lectures on the history of modern psychology from the Enlightenment to his own time, delivered in the fall and winter of 1933–34. In these inaugural lectures, Jung emphasizes the development of concepts of the unconscious and offers a comparative study of movements in French, German, British, and American tho...
This book examines the rise and demise of the psychology of religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and the United States. It considers the formation of the psychology of religion as an international movement, an enterprise whose goal was to refashion the science of religion at the turn of the century. Drawing on published sources and archival accounts, the chapters engage with the work of notable figures including William James, C.G. Jung, and Pierre Janet, placing it alongside lesser-known practitioners such as Ernest Murisier, James Henry Leuba, James Pratt, and George Albert Coe. In addition to probing the intellectual background and professional context for the emergence of this sub-discipline, the book examines the development of key concepts and methodologies among psychologists of religion and offers arguments both for the rise of the discipline as well as for its demise in the early decades of the 20th century.
Until now, the single most important unpublished work by C.G. Jung—The Black Books. In 1913, C.G. Jung started a unique self- experiment that he called his “confrontation with the unconscious”: an engagement with his fantasies in a waking state, which he charted in a series of notebooks referred to as The Black Books. These intimate writings shed light on the further elaboration of Jung’s personal cosmology and his attempts to embody insights from his self- investigation into his life and personal relationships. The Red Book drew on material recorded from 1913 to 1916, but Jung actively kept the notebooks for many more decades. Presented in a magnificent, seven-volume boxed collection featuring a revelatory essay by noted Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani—illuminated by a selection of Jung’s vibrant visual works—and both translated and facsimile versions of each notebook, The Black Books offer a unique portal into Jung’s mind and the origins of analytical psychology.