Religious Experience and Culture: An Enduring Reciprocity

The book presents a reasonable understanding of religious experiences of individuals that may appear inconsequential from any elite theological perspective and of religious experiences that are the result of thinking and observing by professional theologians and social scientists. It looks at the religious experiences occurring in all environments relying on the accumulation of observations and literary enquiries. It deals with broad themes like predetermination of values, the environments for religious experiences, predetermining personal factors where religious experiences are concerned, the communication of religious experiences, violence and religious experiences and the importance of prayer—its use especially for health, the psychological effects and conclusions from experiments with prayer. The benign and malign consequences of religious experiences are studied. It throws light on cultural understandings, spirituality, persona nature of interpretations, process of recognising individualism and the difficulties over what constitutes belief in the context of the religious experience.