RELS 350 Tir/Psyc Religious Experience
William James - America's internationally acclaimed "founding father" of psychology - offered a now famous definition of Religion, which perfectly summarizes the subject matter of the course: Religion...as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experience of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in r relation to whatever they may consider the divine. In this course we will not be concerned with churches, monasteries, or other religious institutions. Nor will we discuss laboratory experiments or statistics. Rather, taking James as our quide, we will focus our attention on the private, first person experiences of actual men and women who have been seized by "religious feelings and impulses".