Religion 40 (2010) 279–285

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Religion
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/religion

From 1799 to 2009: Religious Experience Reconsidereddbackground,

argument, responses
Michael Stausberg
University of Bergen, Norway

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This introductory essay to a review symposium on Religious Experience Reconsidered by Ann Taves (2009)
Accepted 9 August 2010 briefly reviews some main stages of the discussion of religious experience in the study of religion\s with
Available online 28 September 2010 special attention to the Romantic tradition and its apologetic legacy and to more recent attempts to
revise, rehabilitate, or challenge this key category. The essay then summarizes the argument and
Keywords: structure of Taves’ book and highlights main points of the responses.
Religious experience
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Attribution
Specialness
The sacred

Throughout the modern history of the study of religion\s, religious experience has been one of its key topics. In recent decades, crucial
issues such as reductionism, sui generis approaches to the study of religion\s, and the insider/outsider-problem have been discussed with
respect to this topic.
Religious experience has been the keyword for one of the dominant and foundational programs in the history of the modern study of
religion\s, the Romantic tradition, springing from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern
(On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1799). As is well known, in the second of these speeches (which were revised, in part quite
drastically, in the two subsequent editions in 1806 and 1821 respectively), Schleiermacher rejects theories of religion according to which the
core of religion lies in knowledge and action, or metaphysics and morals. Instead, the essence of religion is contemplation and feeling
(Anschauung und Gefühl) of the universe and the infinite (Schleiermacher, 2002, p. 49). He holds that beliefs and doctrines emerge only as
secondary elaborations.
In the early academic study of religion\s, Schleiermacher’s concept of the infinite was an important cornerstone for Max Müller’s ideas
about religion (Tiele, 1899, pp. 228–230; van den Bosch, 2002, p. 306), but Schleiermacher’s legacy, it seems, was either ignored or rejected
by the ‘founders’ of the academic study of religion\s, until Rudolf Otto entered the scene. Incidentally, Otto was the editor of the centenary
edition of Schleiermacher’s Reden in 1899.1 In his bestselling work Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy) from 1917, he seeks to isolate ‘the real
innermost core of religion’ without which ‘no religion would be worthy of the name’ (Otto, 1958, p. 6). In the opening passage of the third
chapter, which is largely devoted to a critical discussion of Schleiermacher’s conception of ‘feeling of dependence’, Otto famously invites his
reader
to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever
cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no farther; for it is not easy to discuss questions of
religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but
cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings (Otto, 1958, p. 8 [my italics]).
In John W. Harvey’s translation it appears as if Otto here identifies feelings (which would render the German Gefühle) with experience
(German: Erfahrung), which, as the passage makes clear, are not necessarily the same thing philosophically speaking, since the first refers to
matters of emotions and the second to consciousness. (See Table 1).
However, the translation is here remarkably imprecise and inconsistent. Where Harvey has experience (which would have one expect the
German Erfahrung), Otto in fact writes Erregtheit, which would be more adequately rendered as arousal. Moreover, Harvey’s ‘moments in his

E-mail address: Michael.Stausberg@uib.no.

1
Otto provided an introduction and a retrospect in his edition.

0048-721X/$ – see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.religion.2010.09.011
280 M. Stausberg / Religion 40 (2010) 279–285

Table 1
Otto in The Idea of the Sacred.

Religious qualifier Category Domain

deeply-felt religious experience consciousness
intrinsically religious feelings emotions

experience’ turn out to be an emendation, for Otto only speaks of ‘such moments’ (solche Momente), implying moments of ‘strong and
preferably one-sided religious arousal’ in a verbatim translation of Otto’s text. Moreover, by qualifying a religious experience as ‘deeply-felt’,
Otto in Harvey’s translation seems to conflate the language specific to the two domains, where that is not the case in the original.2 (See Table 2).
In short, in this passage, and in the remaining parts of Das Heilige, Otto does not use the German equivalent for the word experience at all.

Table 2
Otto in Das Heilige.

Religious qualifier Category Domain

strong and preferably one-sided religious arousal [unspecified]
specifically religious feelings [unspecified]

This notion entered Otto’s vocabulary in the English translation, maybe as a nod to the by now established terminology in Anglophone
psychology of religion.3
Nevertheless, this passage points to the aim of Otto’s book, namely to identify the intrinsically religious, the domain of religion which is
not qualified by or mixed with other aspects. It puts forward important epistemological and methodological restrictions, which have been
extensively discussed. Otto is often aligned to the so-called phenomenology of religion, and from a methodological point of view,
phenomenology, as a research program, can be understood as the rigorous attempt to come as close as possible to the experience of subjects.
It is, however, noteworthy that the notion of experience is conspicuous by its absence in the main works produced by continental
phenomenologists of religion such as Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Gerardus van der Leeuw and Friedrich Heiler (or even Mircea
Eliade), who are more concerned with ‘power’ or ‘the sacred’. In the British tradition of phenomenology, however, the notion of religious
experience features prominently in the work of Ninian Smart, who also called one of his “dimensions” of religion ‘the experiential &
emotional dimension’ (Smart, 1996), thereby faithfully reproducing the conceptual ambivalence in the passage quoted from Otto.4
The culmination of the continental Romantic tradition is Joachim Wach’s late work Types of Religious Experience, which also includes an
appraisal of the work and personality of Rudolf Otto (Wach, 1951, pp. 209–227). In his essay ‘Universals in Religion’, Wach seeks to establish
four formal criteria for defining religious experiences (Wach, 1951, pp. 32–37). Wach is convinced that the systematic, comparative, and
phenomenological analysis of religious experience ultimately can reveal ‘what kind of realities may correspond to the experiences in
question’ (Wach, 1951, p. 30). Accordingly, in his introduction Wach does not hesitate to recall the necessity of addressing the question of
religious truth (Wach, 1951, p. xii: ‘What we wish to know is: what is true?’) and in his Conclusion he proclaims: ‘We have outgrown
historicism and relativism’ (Wach, 1951, p. 229).
Wach has read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), a book that ‘has constituted “religious experience” in a technical
sense as an object of study, defining it as a generic “something” that informed “religion in general” apart from any tradition in particular’
(Taves, 1999, p. 271). Nowhere does James mention Schleiermacher, but James is in agreement with Schleiermacher and the Romantic
tradition ‘that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like trans-
lations of a text into another tongue’ (James, 1902, p. 422) and that one needs to ‘look to the feelings’ in order grasp the ‘essence’ of religion
(James, 1902, p. 494). Unlike Schleiermacher (and Otto for that matter), however, James ‘does not think that religious feeling is psycho-
logically specific’ (Proudfoot, 1985, p. 157). While James does not belong to the Romantic tradition, he clearly shares its apologetic agenda.
For at least on an intuitive reading of the Varieties, which, as every classical text, have been interpreted in a variety of ways, ‘James’s
ostensible purpose is the validation of religious experience’ (Kitcher, 2004, p. 98; though Kitcher wishes to challenge this ‘natural reading’).
In his 1985 book on religious experience, which won the 1986 American Academy of Religion Award, Wayne Proudfoot convincingly
unmasked the kind of protective strategy that Schleiermacher, James, and others adopted to shield an analysis of religious experiences from
analysis originating from outside the religious perspective. Proudfoot extrapolated some of the theoretical ambiguities of a concept which
claims immediate access to a pre-conceptual reality. At the same time, Proudfoot held that previous studies were based on some genuine
insights, and he argued that by engaging philosophical analysis and ascription theory and by carefully distinguishing ‘descriptive,
explanatory, and evocative accounts of religious experience’ (Proudfoot, 1985, p. xv) one would be able to retain religious experience as
a meaningful concept. Proudfoot clearly stated that ‘the concept of religious experience is ours and itself a product of the rise of the study of
comparative religion in a period in which the appeal to religious experience was a strategy employed by theologians’ (Proudfoot, 1985, p.
188), but for him experience is more problematic a concept than religion. In her masterpiece Fits, Trances & Visions from 1999, hailed by

2
Here is the German original (5th ed.) of the passage given in translation above: “Wir fordern auf, sich auf einen Moment starker und möglichst einseitiger religiöser
Erregtheit zu besinnen./Wer das nicht kann oder solche Momente überhaupt nicht kennt, ist gebeten, nicht weiter zu lesen. Denn wer sich zwar auf seine Pubertätsgefühle,
Verdauungsstockungen oder auch Sozialgefühle besinnen kann, auf eigentümlich religiöse Gefühle aber nicht, mit dem ist es schwierig, Religionspsychologie zu treiben“
(Otto, 1920, p. 8).
3
Note that the translator (John W. Harvey) comments on “[t]he ambiguity attaching both to the English feeling and the German Gefühl” in his translator’s preface (Otto,
1958, p. xvi).
4
Smart’s book The Religious Experience of Mankind (Smart, 1969, and many subsequent editions) is a world religions textbook and does not provide any in-depth discussion
of the concept religious experience.
 M. Stausberg / Religion 40 (2010) 279–285 281

Proudfoot as ‘a wonderful book’ in this journal (Proudfoot, 2004, p. 145), Ann Taves referred the reader back to American religious history to
provide the broader context for the prominence of the topic of religious experiencedin particular seemingly involuntary experiencesdand
various attempts at explaining it, ‘the interplay between experiencing religion and explaining experience’ in the period between the
transatlantic awakening in the early eighteenth century and the rise of the psychology of religion and Pentecostalism (Taves, 1999, p. 3).
Religious experience has remained one of the key topics in the study of religion. In the 1990s, Proudfoot was engaged in a debate with
G. William Barnard (Barnard, 1992) who defended an anti-constructivist, perennialist sui generis theory (Barnard, 1997). In 1995, Ralph W.
Hood published a massive handbook of religious experience with 24 chapters dedicated to various psychological approaches and theories and
their application to religious experience, in addition to a survey of religious experience in six ‘faith traditions’ (Hood, 1995). Note that expe-
rience is one of only four concepts (besides religion, gender, and culture) discussed in the two widely used American introductory Religious
Studies companions Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Taylor, 1998) and Guide to the Study of Religion (Braun and McCutcheon, 2000).
During the fifteen years separating the latter from Proudfoot’s book, however, the tide had been changing and the kind of distinctions and
synthesis attempted by the Columbia philosopher of religion seemed no longer viable. Against the Romantic tradition, Robert Sharf warned
‘that it is ill conceived to construe the object of the study of religion to be the inner experience of religious practitioners’ (Sharf, 1998, p. 111).
Every experience-talk occurs ‘in the public realm of contested meanings’ (Sharf, 1998, p. 111). Sharf does not reject experience-talk as
suchdin fact experience may ‘be both irrefutable and indubitable’ (Sharf, 1998, p. 114)dbut he points to the dangers and limitations of
a “relentless deferral of meaning” (Sharf, 1998, p. 113). Timothy Fitzgerald concluded his essay on an even more sinister note by stating that
‘the term “religious experience” has become extended to the point where its analytic power has all but disappeared, and where the
uncritical assumption of a past generation of comparative religionists must be abandoned in favour of a range of more critical categories and
methods of ethnography’ (Fitzgerald, 2000, p. 139). The discursive and critical turn points to rhetorical dimensions of experience-talk, but
‘the rhetoric of experience has come under hard times’ (McCutcheon, 2001, p. 7).
A decade into the new century, cognitive approaches have given fresh impulses (not appreciated by everybody) to put critical categories
in the study of religion back on the agenda. Religious experience is no exception. This is the broader context for the recent book by Ann Taves,
Religious Experience Reconsidered (2009).5 As illustrated by her above-mentioned book, Taves, the current (2010) President of the American
Academy of Religion (AAR), is one of the few scholars of religion who work for a synthesis, or a dialogue, between solid empirical-historical
studies, in her case on American religious history, and contributions to theory.6 In her academic affiliations, Taves shares seemingly
contradictory scholarly interests and theoretical commitments. At the AAR, for example, she served on the Steering Committee of the Critical
Theory and Religious Discourses Group (2004–2007) only to become, in what might appear as kind of an intellectual conversion, the
Founder & Co-Chair of the Cognitive Science of Religion Consultation (2007–2009).7 Not only in her career does Taves navigate the terrain
between critical theory and cognitive sciences, but Religious Experience Reconsidered, which is her first purely theoretical book8, opens with
the ambitious statement, attributed to ‘reasons of temperament and training’ (the latter probably referring to her studies of psychology) to
bridge the divide between the humanities and the natural sciences (Taves, 2009, p. [xiii]). Given that ambition and the critical importance of
the topic of religious experience, and in light of the prominence of the author, the editors of this journal invited a series of scholars (including
Proudfoot and Fitzgerald among those mentioned above) from across the field to comment on selected aspects of this book. Our respondents
have mainly chosen to highlight rather general issues instead of technical details of the argument, which may reflect the fact that the field
appears divided about rather fundamental issues, not the least the very category of religion and the possibility of a ‘scientific’ approach to
the study of religious experience. In order to appreciate the responses, the readers might benefit from a brief summary of the argument of
Religious Experience Reconsidered.

The argument of the book

In her book, Taves suggests shifting the focus from religious experiences to ‘experiences deemed religious’. Rather than singling out
religious experiences as a given, the interest switches to an analysis of the processes that make people conceive of experiences as religious.
Taves argues that the processes of attribution and ascription operate on different levels, and that comparative perspectives are indispensible
for understanding these different processes. In a way this follows up on William James’s interest in comparing religious experiences to non-
religious forms of experience (Taves, 1999, p. 277), but it shifts the focus to the different modes of ascription and attribution. Just as James’s
book, apart from an analysis of religious experiences, in fact contained a full-fledged theory of religion, so does the book by Ann Taves, at
least as a point of departure. She advocates a ‘building-block approach’ to theorizing religion and suggests understanding religions as
‘composite formations’.
In her Preface, Taves makes explicit the view of human nature and the ‘naturalist’ agenda that inform her work:
The book presupposes that we humans are reflexively conscious biological animalsdthat is, animals who are not only consciously aware,
but aware of being aware. This means that our experience can be studied both as a biological phenomenon from the science side of the
divide and as a subjective phenomenon from the humanistic side. The book is written for those interested in taking both perspectives
into account to develop a naturalistic understanding of experiences deemed religious (Taves, 2009, p. xiv).
The body of the work is divided into an introduction, four chapters, followed by a Conclusion (pp. 161–165), some appendixes and
a glossary. The first chapter, ‘Religion: deeming things religious’ (pp. 16–55) is the one most immediately engaging for Religious Studies
readers, and it is here that her attempt to navigate the theoretical terrain between critical and ‘scientific’ theorizing comes to the foreground.

5
Taves, 2008, contains some main elements of her theory.
6
Taves, who holds a Ph.D. from the Divinity School, the University of Chicago (1983), is the Virgil Cordano, OFM, Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of Religious
Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara (since 2005). Prior to this she was Professor of the History of Christianity and American Religion, Claremont School of
Theology, and Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University (since 1993).
7
She also serves on the Executive Committee of the International Association for Cognitive Science and Religion (since 2006).
8
Her first book delt with Roman Catholic devotions in the USA (Taves, 1986). She also edited the memoirs of an 18th-century Congregationalist woman whose husband
had abused her, and who had committed adultery with their female servants and incest with one of their daughters (Taves, 1989).
282 M. Stausberg / Religion 40 (2010) 279–285

Taves sets out to study religious experience as a sort of what she calls ‘religious thing’da category that includes events, experiences, objects,
or goalsdand she distinguishes between two approaches to the study of religious experience: the sui generis model and the ‘ascriptive’
model, which assumes that religious things (specifically experiences) are not inherently religious (or non-religious) but are constituted or
constructed as such by people. This is quite in line with critical theoretical approaches and she also briefly addresses some concerns that
critical theorists have with the concepts ‘religion’ (which she characterizes as an abstraction) and ‘religious’, which are Western folk
categories with unstable and contested meanings (p. 25).9 Inspired by Durkheim, Taves suggests reverting to a broader category of
specialness in order to avoid the problems of terminology and to develop a broader and more generic category that is more apt as a ‘starting
point for cross-cultural and cross-temporal research’ (p. 27). Taves suggests breaking down the category of religion by looking at specialness
as ascribed to thingsd‘singular’ or ‘special things’ (p. 29). She then goes on to investigate ‘marks of specialness’ (pp. 29–35), i.e. behaviours
whereby people ascribe a specific value to things, which makes them appear as inherently different from other things, and where they
attribute specific consequences to any violation of this setting apart (or the things so set apart). In addition, there are kind of things that
seem to be regarded as special, namely ideal things and anomalous things, the latter category to be differentiated into anomalous expe-
riences of agency (typically referring to deities), to which people ascribe intentionality, and anomalous places, objects, and events to which
people ascribe existence but, according to Taves, only passive agency (‘types of specialness’, pp. 35–46). Taves distinguishes between
ascription and attribution, which ‘allows us to distinguish between the creation of special things through a process of singularization, in
which people consciously or unconsciously ascribe special characteristics to things, and the attribution of causality to the thing or the
behaviours associated with it’ (p. 13). While the ascriptive approach may resonate with features of critical theorizing, Taves goes one step
further when she claims that ‘we may be biologically primed to see some things as special’ (p. 48). She distinguishes between simple and
composite ascriptions, which both may operate on an individual and on a collective level, where groups achieve composite ascriptions by
creating conditions for the perpetuation of an initial ‘thing’. For Taves, ascriptions of specialness are the building blocks of religion, which
then, for example by configurations or chains of practices, are transformed into ‘protoreligions and protospirualities’ (p. 46). Religious or
spiritual traditions are complicated formations based on composite ascriptions, in which ‘claims on direct perceptions or immediate feelings
play a more limited role’ (p. 55).
The conclusion of the second chapter, which tries to untangle the concept experience (pp. 56–87), seems to resonate with main concerns
of the recent criticism of the notion of religious experience when Taves emphasizes the public character of claims to experience: ‘the
interactive, hence also negotiated and contested, nature of public claims regarding experience, whether in “real time” or after the fact’,
which also implies ‘that any method of analyzing how claims are made needs to be interactive and, at bottom, conversationally based’
(p. 87). She arrives at these conclusions by way of a review of a range of readings from philosophy, neurosciences and other fields, which
allows her to distinguish types and levels of consciousness and mental processing. Taves also discusses the problem of access to experience,
where she emphasizes embodied meanings (from the neurophysiological level upwards) and communicative interactions. The chapter
contains a chart of types of data that can be gathered relative to experience (p. 69) and discusses different ways of collecting research data on
experiences. This is followed by a discussion of the relationship between experience and representation as exemplified by dreams, trance/
possession, and meditation respectively in light of the kind of data available to study them (pp. 73–86).
Since Taves devises specialness as a more encompassing category than religion/religious she acknowledges that people do not neces-
sarily explain things that they construct or perceive as special automatically as religious. Attributing a religious quality to things therefore
amounts to the core of a theory of religion and given that we are dealing with attributive processes, attribution theory, a body of theory in
social psychology that tries to explain how people explain events, seems like a natural choice. Accordingly, the third chapter, entitled
‘Explanation’ (pp. 88–119), starts with an overview of attribution theory and its previous extension to religion (by Proudfoot and others).
Against constructionist theories, Taves opts ‘in favour of a model that takes “bottom-up” or unconscious processes more seriously’ (p. 93).
With a view to two autobiographical narratives of religious experience (by Bradley and Barnard), Taves then unfolds ‘an attributional theory
of religion’ (pp. 94–111), where she distinguishes between (a) events and attributors and (b) descriptive analysis (everyday explanations)
and meta-explanations of everyday explanations. She then suggests analyzing events and attributors on four levels: the intrapersonal, the
interpersonal, the intragroup, and the intergroup levels respectively. On each level, she outlines how an event is potentially analyzed by an
attributor (a subject explaining an experience in terms of religion) and how the evidence might be explained by researchers.
Repeatedly Taves states that the sui generis approach to religious experience has in fact shielded such experiences ‘from naturalistic
explanations’ (p. 118); instead, an attributional approach opens for a comparison of experiences deemed religious and those deemed
otherwise. Comparison, then, is the title and topic of the fourth chapter (pp. 120–160). Starting with a general discussion on the issue and
problems of comparison, Taves proceeds to specify a point of comparison in research (pp. 126–128). She then suggests distinguishing
between comparing single and composite formations (single/single; composite/composite; simple/composite), which can be done either on
an intracontextual or on an intercontextual (e.g. cross-cultural) level. The latter is then illustrated by the case of sleep paralysis (exemplifying
a single/single ascription comparison), which can be analyzed in three stages. A comparison of composite ascriptions is exemplified by
Wandel’s study of the conflicts over the Eucharist during the Reformation era (pp. 140–149). A single/composite comparison is exemplified
by the case that ‘a simple formation (visionary experiences) provides a point of analogy between two composite formations (medieval
Catholicism and modern neopaganism)’ (p. 150). According to Taves, all three sets of comparisons address the issue of a ‘transition zone
between what is imagined (as if) and what seems real (what is)’ (p. 156). She concludes the chapter by discussing the difference between
emic and etic observers and by reviewing the question of different modes in which experience might seemingly become real (in context of
ritual, by specific techniques, or spontaneously) (pp. 156–160).
In her conclusion (pp. 161–165), Taves emphasizes that switching to an ascriptive formulation shifts the focus from religion to the
adjective religious and paying attention to special things shifts the focus from religion to ‘the component parts or building blocks that can be
assembled in various ways to create more complex socio-cultural formations’ (p. 162). While Taves finds that ‘some researchers have been

9
At closer scrutiny, one may suspect that even non-folk categories (presumably academic terms) eventually have an unstable meaning and are occasionally contested.
Some eventually become folk categories.
 M. Stausberg / Religion 40 (2010) 279–285 283

too quick to identify unusual experiences as the primary source of experience,’ she also condescends that ‘unusual experiences of various
sorts have played a large role in initial ascriptive claims’ (p. 163).
In her Preface, Taves anticipates three types of objections by scholars of religion\s to the approach she advocates:
First, they suggest that the subject matter is passé in an era that has abandoned experience for discourse about experience. Second, they
worry that an approach that compares religious and non-religious things will wind up being ‘reductionistic’dthat is, it will ‘reduce’
religion to something else. And third, they offer critiques of scientific methods and claims drawn from science studies (pp. [xiii]–xiv).

The responses

Let us briefly summarize some of the concerns expressed by our respondents (whilst neglecting the applause that Religious Experience
Reconsidered deservedly received). The responses range from sympathetic commentary and friendly amendments to criticisms that reflect
disagreement on some fundamental issues.
The second, and to some extent the third imagined criticism resound in the response by Finnbar Curtis who picks up from Taves’ attempt
to alleviate the troubles with reductionism in the study of religion\s. Like some other respondents, he takes Taves’ book as an example of the
so-called cognitive science of religion tout court. In an hermeneutics of suspicion, Curtis situates Taves’ book in a much larger context,
namely that of modernity, which fashioned the secular intellectual, for whom the violation of taboos, as implied by scholarly reductionism,
was part of professional self-affirmation of a modernizing elite ultimately committed to a secular ontology (Curtis, 2010). This mentality, in
turn, unleashed the global expansion of capitalist markets, which now threatens to explode into ecological apocalypse, for which secularist
normative options (as embodied by cognitive science), which rival religious ones, can in Curtis’ account hardly provide a plausible solution
(given that they, to some extent, share a responsibility of having created the problem in the first place). This contextualization of Taves’ book,
informed by critical theory, is however, as Curtis readily points out, not a judgement on the scientific soundness of cognitive science (and
Taves’ book).
Taves’ first anticipation matches parts of the criticism voiced by Matthew Day who holds that the project to re-establish religious
experience as a valid category and relevant topic in the study of religion\s is a hopeless one, a lost battle, at the outset. For Day, Taves’ attempt
to throw light on the (psychological) mechanisms that makes people set some things apart invariably gives way to the metaphysical project
of being able to identify the nature of such special things. Day denies the existence of any relevant cognitive and psychological constraints
and mechanisms; instead, he emphasizes that special things are manufactured, that these are public processes, and that analysis should
focus on the various social and political interests that are at play when people claim the special status of things; scholars ought to analyze
the techniques and strategies by which such claims are produced (Day, 2010).
Timothy Fitzgerald raises a different concern with regard to Taves’ ideas about specialness. Fitzgerald points to an ambivalence in her
position towards religion: while on the one hand decomposing the religious into special things (or things deemed religious/special), on the
other hand Fitzgerald finds her unfolding a protective, caretaker-like privileging of religion since she hardly discusses any non-religious
examples of special things (such as, for example, justice). Where Curtis points to the necessary taboo-breaking impetus of science, Fitzgerald
refers to Durkheim’s theory of systems of classification and representation, which are typically protected by taboos. Fitzgerald interprets
Taves’ work as an example of how our system of classification, built on the category of religion, is protected against violation through
secondary elaboration. Fitzgerald argues that religion is not a stand-alone category but requires the secular as its necessary counterpart and,
similar to Curtis, he criticizes Taves for not reflecting on her own secular positionality and for re-affirming the system of classification and
ideological binaries that her work, to his eyes, could or should have potentially challenged, but within which she appears to be imprisoned
(Fitzgerald, 2010).
Similarly, Kocku von Stuckrad challenges Taves’ claim that the experiences deemed religious by subjects should count as evidence for
religion in scholarly contexts, a strategy that, to his eyes, may reflect the danger that dichotomies given by Western epistemes are
uncritically adopted by scholars lacking in the necessary reflexivity. Von Stuckrad’s tone, however, is mellower than either Day or Fitzgerald,
and where they dismiss Taves’ attempt as futile, ill conceived or misrecognized, von Stuckrad, who is also informed by critical theory, wishes
to open for a dialogue between philosophy and history and the cognitive science of religion. He also provides some examples of hypothetical
intersection (von Stuckrad, 2010).
Gustavo Benavides finds Taves account to be most compelling where she discusses specific historical examples such as the Buddhist
Ascending Hall Ceremony and the Reformation era controversies, but he criticizes her tendency only to focus on ‘positive’ examples of
religious experience. Like von Stuckrad, Benavides hopes for a future cross-fertilization of the kind of theoretical work done in Religious
Experience Reconsidered on the one hand and ethnographic and historical scholarship from a variety of cultural contexts on the other.
Contrary to commentators with a commitment to critical theory and postmodernism, Benavides appreciates Taves’ theoretical assertive-
ness, which goes beyond the habitual unmasking of the constructed character of the phenomenon under investigation (an assertiveness
that, to the above-mentioned respondents, appeared as a betrayal of critical reflexivity). Benavides invites Taves to pay greater attention to
the importance of aesthetics. While he appreciates her attempt to get beyond the burdens carried by concepts such as the sacred in
introducing the notion of specialness, Benavides also finds that this form of sanitation comes at the cost of neglecting the ambivalence given
by the older concepts, implying a far too benign portrayal of the phenomenon under investigation (Benavides, 2010).
Kim Knott also addresses this proposed terminological shift. She acknowledges some advantages of the term specialness, in part
regarding the religious/secular dichotomy (at which point Knott’s views criss-cross with the concerns raised by Curtis and Fitzgerald), but
likewise she regrets that this comes at the loss of part of the appeal of the concept of the sacred. Knott suggests that it is precisely the specific
place of this concept in the Western imagination that gives it a significant comparative and cross-cultural purchase, so that the particular
problems connected to this category–i.e. its constructed character and historical contingency–can also have a specific promise. Not only is it
unlikely that ‘the sacred’, given its specific claim to authority, will disappear as an emic term, so that it will continue to be of interest to
scholars interested in public discourses on matters of relevance for religion, but neglecting it as an etic (second-order) concept also comes at
the potential cost of not paying sufficient attention to the possibility of its more creative theoretical legacy, in particular its proposed
potential to theorize aspects of the (post-) secular (Knott, 2010).
284 M. Stausberg / Religion 40 (2010) 279–285

James Spickard likewise discusses Taves’ attempt to clear the ground for a reconsideration of religious experience (in terms of ascriptive
and attributive processes of deeming special things religious). He holds that the very project of comparing experiences deemed religious to
such that are not deemed religious invariably reintroduces by the backdoor the contentious issue of religion that she wanted to avoid at the
outset. Like Curtis, Spickard seeks to contextualize Taves’ work, but unlike Curtis his frames of reference are of a disciplinary and
a geographical nature, namely religious studies in the USA. Spickard, a sociologist with a record of ethnographic work, holds that the cultural
climate prevailing in the USA seems to force practitioners of the marginalized trade of religious studies to address the issue of whether
religion is ‘real’ or not. In the case of Taves, Spickard finds that she unnecessarily makes metaphysical commitments, which he, on a different
level of analysis, sees grounded in her explanatory-naturalist program that comes in a package with a specific theory of religion. Similar to
Day, Spickard finds that an overemphasis on psychological analysis leads Taves to neglect the social dimension of the attributive processes
(Spickard, 2010).
Spickard also voices some objections to the building-block approach proposed by Taves. In this he is joined by other respondents. Lee
Kirkpatrick, another outsider to the discipline of religious studies, likewise comments on the state of religious studies by comparing it to his
home discipline, psychology. Compared to psychology, which shares basic institutional, organizational, methodological, and theoretical
assumptions, religious studies, being a discipline that is defined by the object it studies rather than by the way in which it studies objects,
seems to be endlessly engaged in negotiating fundamental issues. Religious Experience Reconsidered exemplifies this situation. While reli-
gious studies, again exemplified by Taves, has gone away from sui generis models of explaining religion and religious matters to other models
(here: ascriptive/attributional ones), Kirkpatrick refers to recent attempts in the psychology of religion that favour a sui generis approach by
establishing religion as an independent psychological factor or personality trait. While Kirkpatrick welcomes the building-block approach in
principle, as a psychologist he also warns about the varieties of psychological systems and levels of analysis that one would need to account
for by attempting to do sodwith vertical integration probably remaining an elusive project. While religious studies, given extended debates
about definitions of religion, might welcome the alternative strategy and terminology as proposed by Taves, Kirkpatrick opines that, from
a psychological perspective, talking about specialness would easily lead to another kind of imbroglio. Where Fitzgerald points to justice as
a potential (non-religious) special thing, Kirkpatrick introduces the analogy of sports to exemplify some of the problems addressed in his
essay (Kirkpatrick, 2010).
Wayne Proudfoot raises two issues. First he emphasizes the mutual relationships between bottom-up and top-down processing in
analyzing ascriptions and attributions, where a top-down type of analysis that takes into account the importance of learned concepts and
norms tends to be neglected by researchers. Proudfoot also comments on the proposed building-block approach: he expresses some
hesitation about the metaphor and articulates some doubts on the sequentiality of ascription and attribution as proposed by Taves.
Moreover, he notes that, rather than religions being buildings that are erected on experiences deemed religious, the experiences themselves
are constantly being reinterpreted (Proudfoot, 2010).
All in all, the responses to Ann Taves’ Religious Experience Reconsidered (which are printed in alphabetic order) are not only relevant
because of their critical engagement with Taves’ book, but many of them reflect fundamental debates and disagreements regarding the
current shape of the field of religious studies. Instead of editorial comments on the responses (not all of which seem equally persuasive to
me), following the customary practice in this genre, the final word is here left to Ann Taves who has kindly agreed to write a reply in which
she comments on some key topics (attribution, specialness, cognition and culture, and taboos) addressed by her respondents (Taves, 2010).
Instead of defending her book against her critics, Taves has made us of the responses to carry her thinking forward. The present review
symposium is an example of the emergent quality of dialogical scholarship.

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