Accepted Senior Papers

Gianni Vattimo characterizes an important aspect of the "religious", understood philosophically, as "an irruption of the ‘Other’ and as discontinuity in the horizontal course of history". He also believes that "this discontinuity and irruption is too often understood--once again--as a pure and ‘apocalyptic’ negation of historicity, as an absolute new beginning that renounces every link with the past and establishes a purely vertical relation with transcendence". Is it possible to view in these statements an unintended yet no less suggestive description of the tragic events of September 11, events that epitomize Derrida’s invocation of "radical evil: perjury, lies, remote-control murder, ordered at a distance even when it rapes and kills with bare hands"? A radical evil that "both destroys and institutes the religious [emphasis his]"?

Those who bore witness to this evil often responded in ways that they characterized as "religious". And, as even a cursory glance at religious websites or airport bookstores shelves will guarantee, offering testimony to the event has become a vital post-September 11 form of "religious experience", one that has outlasted the ultimately evanescent increase in church attendance. Yet identifying the bearing of witness in this way raises at least two immediate questions: what is the status of subjectivity of the one who bears witness, particularly when such a subject cannot be identified with some notion of "self-identical interiority"; and what is the status of giving testimony as "religious experience"? Indeed, given the demise of "onto-theological conceptual schemes and of traditional religiosity", these questions take on special urgency.

My paper will seek to respond to these questions, first of all, by arguing that Karl Rahner’s "Theological Observations on the Concept of Witness" may offer a prototypical characterization of witness as a relation to alterity. Such a characterization, despite Rahner’s use of a clearly onto-theological philosophical basis and transcendental method, may provide a useful point of departure for a subsequent examination of Levinas’s ethical subject as a prophetic bearer of witness to the Infinite, though not within the "real time" of history or experience. Finally, I will put his analysis of witness in dialogue with Derrida’s notion of testimony as uniting faith and the holy in an ethical, "quasi-religious experience" that undoes the "auto-immune" religious violence that spawns radical evil.

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Religious Experience and the Ambiguities of Liberation

Encounters with the living God--the first person of the Trinity--have not figured prominently in the development of recent liberation theological projects: Black, feminist, womanist, Latin American. The deity who appears in these programmatic theologies is singularly committed to disentangling oppressed subjects, individual and collective, from the structures of dehumanization.

When examining the actual accounts of the divine-human encounter from members of these indigenous populations, the perception of God who emerges is far more ambiguous in His (usually masculine) relationship to structures of oppression, and the human subject found within them. Yet it is within this context of static social structures that radically transformational encounters with the divine take place which reveal multiple and complex dimensions of God not yet translated into late modern theological projects.

This paper proposes to provide a phenomenological theology of religious experience within conditions of extreme oppression as a disclosure of nature and character of God which disrupts the premature closure of systematic doctrines of divine intentionality. The relationship between the human subject caught within conditions of extreme limit, and the apophadic character of divinity will be explored through an examination of language and narrative. Close attention to the bodily articulations of divine identity will also be examined with a focus upon the relationship between encounter, enactment, and the transformation of the trauma of oppression through the trauma of transcendence.

Ritual and the Religious

Ritual is a constitutive aspect of a religious life form. But is it an experiential mode of religious ways of life? Or is it at the opposite of the experiential aspects or types called religious? I argue that the proper place of ritual within religious practices, traditions, and life forms can only be appreciated when it is recognized that ritualising is itself a way of experiencing, or rather a mode that affects each experiential element contributing to the religious life and deserving to be termed religious. It is typical of religions to go through phases and structural tensions between ritualism and antiritualism. Each time a religious form of life (and a broader form of life) is going through a phase of antiritual, it is clear that ritual or its substitutes slips in through the back door. This seems to be because of the fact that human ways of dealing with the sacred are irremediably mediated by more or less formalized materializations, i.e. forms of embodiment, making for the right balance between distance and closeness with respect to the ‘transhuman’. But the relations are more intricate than this picture suggests: it seems that, moreover, ritual traditions are themselves constituted by structurally and temporally determined tensions among ritual proper and antiritual: antiritual interpretations of ritualising traditions appear to play a crucial role in the very re-embodiment of ritual, and thus, in the relation between ritual and its experiential soil.

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Levinas’s divine comedy in the theatre of religious experience

The paper explores the phenomenon of comedy and its relation to Lévinas’s divine comedy. This focus generates a thesis, that divine comedy traces phenomenological apertures to exteriority, yet without communicating a kerygma of the infinite. This thesis investigates the performative structures or registers of comedy that pervade its various linguistic expressions, not so much on how comedy signifies, but what the phenomenon of comedy signifies, and in particular, if comedy is capable of signifying otherwise in the superlative metaphor, divine comedy. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, whose references to ‘divine comedy’ are invoked in expositions on alterity, subjectivity, and ethics, this paper argues that comedy simulates the trace of multiple incisions of the infinite in human experience, endorsing the phenomenological capacity of comedy to signify otherwise. Levinas suggests that divine comedy per se is the paradoxical experience of trauma, in which the subject is also responsible for invoking a comic torque, thereby eliding two dimensions of divine comedy within human experience—interruption and ethical responsibility. Divine comedy calls unified subjectivity into question and celebrates a split in the human experience of truth, while the a-symmetrical structure of comedy simulates ethical possibility in exposure to otherness, bearing testimony to the good beyond being. Further, comedy demonstrates variegated modes of peripeteia in the phenomenon of time, making explicit its bifurcating effects on meaning and perspectival receipt as novelty and judgment, while arousing an involuntary kinaesthetic response to the appresentation of the other. Is this response (laughter) from the human centrifuge, an oblique kerygma of the divine—who recedes infinitely in transcendence?

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The Tension between Science, Tradition and (Mystical) Experiencein Ernst Troeltsch(1865-1923) and Friedrich von Hügel (1852-1925)

The movement of liberal theology in German Protestantism has generally suffered from a bad press, especially because of the exclusivist attention for the proclamation of the Word of God in the movement of dialectical theology. It is indeed true that a lot of these liberal theologians, especially in their reconstruction of the life of Jesus, were claiming that the dogmatic tradition of the churches could completely be dismissed with. It will be my contention that Ernst Troeltsch was as a liberal theologian always anxious to maintain a fine balance between the three most important epistemological sources of his theology: (1) historical-critical scholarship, (2) a sense of tradition and (3) a well-developed religious imagination, even if his respect for tradition has often been questioned by other theologians.

In the first section of this lecture (1) I will briefly recall how Troeltsch as one of the co-founders of the History of Religions School abandoned the dogmatic method in favour of the historical method. In doing so he had to be critical against one particular school of the Protestant tradition, the school of Ritschl. But he also warned against absolutizing the historical method, so that it would not be perverted in the ideology of historicism. (2) In order to point out the importance of tradition for Troeltsch, I wish to refer on the one hand to his Glaubenslehre, on the other hand to his contribution in the debate on the essence of Christianity. In both cases, however, it will become clear that his embrace of tradition is not uncritical. Following Schleiermacher, he is willing to deliver a contemporary description of Lutheran doctrine as it has been developed in a particular cultural framework. In his reconstruction of the essence of Christianity Troeltsch is not only interested in the timeless ethical teaching of Jesus, as was Harnack. The essence of Christianity, according to him, is also not identical with the sum total of the dogmatic tradition, as was the opinion of Loisy. According to Troeltsch, in the course of the history of Christianity different aspects have been emphasized. It is the creative work of the theologian to highlight the complementarity of these aspects. (3) This brings us to the last source of theology, according to Troeltsch, which is the personal sensitivity of the theologian for the hand of God in the entire history of salvation. Troeltsch described this activity differently in the course of his career. In his early works he spoke about the importance of developing a metaphysics of history alongside the meticulous application of the historical method. In other works he spoke about the importance of developing a mystical experience of reality. This aspect is even present in a few works which he prepared after his transition from the theological faculty of Heidelberg to the chair of philosophy in Berlin.

In the second section I will first indicate how Troeltsch links these three virtues for the theologian – belonging to a tradition, critical scholarship which is often at a distance from tradition and religious-mystical experience/imagination – with specific sociological forms of Christianity: church, sect, and mysticism. I will use his 1912 masterpiece on Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen as the classical text in which he reflects on the relationship between the three.

However, thanks to their friendly correspondence and to the reading of his work Friedrich von Hügel was able to receive the viewpoint of his friend Troeltsch in his own reflection on ‘The Three Elements of Religion’ which forms part of the introduction to his 1908 book on The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends. After discussing this text I will indicate how the life of this theologian was also characterized by a sincere devotion to historical critical scholarship, a deep loyalty to the Roman Catholic tradition including a moderate form of Ultramontanism, and much attention for prayer and mystical experience.

Diving into Darkness: The Religious Experience of Women Survivors Of Domestic Violence

This year’s conference theme calls for a new look at the relationship between religious experience and theology. In a world torn by violence rooted in both religious belief and religious hatred, it seems necessary to think again about the foundational claims made by religion. This paper will address the concept of religious experience from within the perspective of women survivors of domestic violence. From where they stand, we can think again about where theology fits into the puzzle.

In working as a counselor and friend with women survivors of domestic violence, I would characterize their fundamental religious experience as "diving into darkness," running head-long into the complete unknown. The deepest belief they have is that their abuser will find them and hurt them. As they run, they "know" they will not survive. And yet they dive.

One Story

Maria huddles with her five children behind a garbage dumpster, in the back of a gasoline station, one block from the apartment where she lives, waiting for the friend she called to pick them up. She’s carried with her a few duffle bags filled with clothes and toys. Her heart is pounding in her chest. She knows that her husband will drive home unexpectedly from work, see that she has left, and come straight there to drag her home. She stands there blindly, numbly, waiting.

How could she leave under these circumstances? Her experience is revelatory of life in our times, of the starting point for theology. Crying out to God and running to God without waiting for a reply, is an act of hope and faith. It is the driving force of the human spirit that informs religious experience. "We cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and he heard our cry and saw our affliction, our toil and our oppression. He brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand and outstretched arm." (Deuteronomy 26:7). Had God not responded, theology would not exist. Today, it is that raw courage in the face of suffering that clears a path to finding the truth in theology.

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Religious Experience in the Works of Michel de Certeau

Mon horizon. Ma recherche portant sur l’évaluation du statut de l’expérience en théologie m’a conduit à analyser comment plusieurs productions théologiques contemporaines "travaillent" la notion d’expérience en théologie. Il est très intéressant de se rendre compte comment les horizons épistémologiques conditionnent les travaux des différents théologiens et théologiennes. Différentes typologies mettent ces liens en lumière. Ce travail m’a permis de mettre en évidence deux critères du faire théologique, les notions de théologal et de situation, qui favorisent l’élaboration d’un discours théologique pertinent pour aujourd’hui. Je proposais dans un de mes derniers textes de considérer l’importance de faire basculer la théologie en expérience, si je voulais arriver à articuler une théologie "travaillée" par cette notion. Sans cette bascule, le travail théologique use de cette notion de manière plutôt rhétorique sans trop se laisser déranger par sa réalité.

Ma proposition proprement dite. L’oeuvre fascinante de Michel de Certeau gravite autour de l’expérience religieuse. Ne cherche-t-il pas à reformuler à travers ses travaux sur le passé et le présent, comment l’expérience théologale se dit et ce, en tenant compte de notre situation moderne, voire post-moderne? De Certeau ne met-il pas à sa manière la théologie en expérience? La mise en lumière d’une dynamique présence-absence de Dieu ne pourrait-elle pas proposer un discours théologique autre, qui assume la présence théologale rupturée? Cette posture serait d’une part sensible tant aux théologies qui proclament son absence qu’à celles qui disent en articuler son expérience. La posture théologique en expérience de de Certeau nous permettrait-elle de tisser plus étroitement un dire théologique en expérience pertinent pour aujourd’hui, un dire théologal signifiant pour nos contemporains? Je propose l’exploration de cette pensée, afin d’articuler une possible posture théologique en expérience.

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The three paradigms curreltly in use in the discussion on Christianity and the religions, in so far as they have been considered as mutually contradictory, have failed to offer an adequate solution from the view-point of Christian theology. The inclusivist and the 'pluralist' models must be shown not to contradict each other, but rather to be mutually complementary. In a recent book entitled Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue (Orbis Books, Maryknoll - Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 2002), I propose an inclusivist-pluralistic paradigm as the key for a theology capable of accounting at once for the Christian faith in Jesus Christ universal Saviour and a positive role of the religions of the world in God's plan for humankind.

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"Let Wisdom Speak to your heart...":  A Monastic Theological Epistemology

Through an exploration of the work of Aelred of Rievaulx, the paper will reconceive theology together with religious experience as a complex determined by the presence they both acknowledge and seek. In his proof of God’s existence, Aelred converges theology into religious experience, completing his proof with an appeal to experience of God, while locating the proof, itself, as such experience. Theology becomes a mode of religious experience, a first-order discourse (on analogy with Auerbach’s notion [Real Presences] of responsive creativity as the true interpretive act), not a second order discourse easily detached from experience. This detachment creates the problem of theological epistemology, introducing the possibility, perhaps inevitability, of the question of the referentiality of such a dis-embodied discourse. Moreover, Aelred assumes that religious experience is not a given, to be expressed or constructed by theology, but that the two, together, are a taking by God. Thus, religious experience (including its theological dimension) is not a commodity at our disposal for self-expression, religious legitimization, or scientific analysis. Rather, it is the reality of an openness to presence, while theology, as the intellectual mode of the reception of presence, testifies to the modes of its coming and the contours of its being. This understanding of the relationship of theology and experience eludes Lindbeck’s typology in The Nature of Doctrine, since theology and experience are not set by Aelred in counterpoint to one another, but are understood together in the context of their more fundamental (substantive) relationship to God.

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Christian faith, apophatic theology and experience of transcendence: some reflections by three medieval mystical authors from the Low Countries

The presentation focusses on three short passages about the contemplatio, the experience of ‘seeing God’, taken from the œuvre of mystical authors from the Low Countries: William of Saint-Thierry (1075-1148), Hadewijch (XIIIth century) and John of Ruusbroec (1293-1381). 

The starting point is a well-known passage from William’s De natura et dignitate amoris about the ‘two eyes of love’ of contemplating God, a text in which the apophatic theology and the endless human desire are seen as necessary counterparts, fundamentally needing each other. 

About one century later, this text was translated by Hadewijch and integrated in her Letter 18. On the basis of this text, she describes her dynamic and transcendent concept of the human soul — the soul is not an entity, but a ‘way’ — in order to clarifies how a immediate and passive experience of God’s presence is possible.

Again one century later, John of Ruusbroec specifies (in his Spiritual Espousals) that, though apophatic theology is a necessary aspect of christian faith, it contains nevertheless an invitation to something more, namely to meet Christ and to ‘dwell in Him’. In these three texts, neither ‘knowlegde’ nor ‘experience’ seem to be an aim in itself, but both are related to that what seems to be the real aim: the mutual and abysmal relation of love between God and the human person.

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I An Echo of a Prophetic Voice

Among the principal problems currently affecting humankind in the largely de-Christianised, 
post-modern society of Western Europe and North America are a loss of meaning, a loss of the 
sense of community in the secular and religious domains, as well as complex difficulties of an 
experiential nature in the realm of faith, including unbelief and atheism. These problems are caused, it is claimed, by the church and the historical fragmentation of Christendom (Chrétiens désunis). This analysis of modernity, if correct, points to a prophetic, charismatic element in the theology of Yves Congar, acclaimed French ecumenist, for it is based mainly on conclusions presented in some of his most important writings.

II ‘Ecumenical ethics’: A Response to the Genesis of Modern Unbelief
In this paper, I shall argue, first, that Congar’s contribution to ecumenical dialogue gave fresh 
impetus for a Catholic Church contribution to the widest possible experience of reconciliation at 
Vatican II and in the post-conciliar period. Second, I shall be concerned to show how Congar’s 
‘ecumenical experience’ contributes to a process of reconciliation and renewal in European culture and society. Finally, without engaging in polemics, fundamentally foreign to Congar’s theology and ‘political’ strategy, I wish to examine the implications of the ‘reciprocal respect for final and divisive choices’ required of all ‘ecumenical ethics’ (Jean Guitton).

Since 2004 will mark the centenary of Bernard Lonergan’s birth, I propose a paper tracing his retrieval of religious experience as a foundation for "empirical theology". Lonergan’s hope was to go beyond "theory" to "interiority", where presence to one’s own performance would clarify the operations whereby theology evolves. This is the core of his book Method in Theology, which insists that theology’s task to reflect on religion within a culture. At the heart of religion lies "religious experience", which he saw as the crowning fulfilment of self-transcendence, but not its product. Here human achievement is transformed into being-in-love by gift of God. This state is the dynamic birthplace of conversion and faith, and yet always subject to aberration. Such an interpretation of religious experience raises the question as to how the mystery of love, in all religions, can become the root of authentic spirituality.

The paper would also include comparison with less "transcultural" theologians, such as Sebastian Moore (Downside Abbey, UK) and Pierangelo Sequeri (Milan, Italy). Moore insists that Christian religious experience echoes the shock of the first witnesses of the Resurrection: the great story transforms our smaller stories. Sequeri, confronting the sensibility of postmodernity, highlights the affective surprise of God as the root of revelation in believing consciousness. Through the convergence of these authors, we can identify some necessary scaffolding for the discernment of religious experience in terms of its fruits, individual and communitarian.

Relational ontology and mystical experience

The aim of my intervention is to highlight an interpretation of the mystical experience on the basis of a relational ontology, that is an ontology that understands being as relation instead of defining being as substance. In this paradigm the emergence of nothingness or void - which constitutes an essential part of the conscience of the mystical experience - corresponds to the relational understanding of the experiencing subject when he/she recognizes his/her being in God’s being. The epistemological structure of this relational ontology may aid the comparative method of religions in disclosing the underneath mystics among world religions and at the same time to overcome conflicts between dual and non-dual religions, between personal and im/suprapersonal theologies. The main goal is therefore to ease the dialogue between covenantal religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and advaita (Hinduism and Buddhism).

My intervention should be divided into three major parts. The first part should deal with outlining the shift from a substantial to a relational paradigm, especially in Christian theology, and with characterizing the major features of this different ontology of relation. The second part will analyze the structure of monotheistic and cosmic religious conscience. Without going into too many details I will focus on the essential of these two major religious experiences. Going back to the mystical tradition in Christianity I will try to draw a bridge that may help the dialogue between East and West. In the third part I will express in relational language the epistemological structure of the mystical consciousness.

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Religious Experience and Immigrants in the US

For the last ten years, I have dedicated much time and research on the religious experience of undocumented Mexican Immigrants living in the United States. While the subject of immigration is not new to the religious history of the United States, Mexican immigration has become particularly important as the demographics of U.S. American society shift dramatically in a Hispanic direction. [Recent census data estimates that over thirty five million Americans are Hispanic, which is roughly 12.5% of the population but quickly expected to become 20 percent in the decades to come]. Despite their vast numbers and critical contribution they make to US Society, Mexican immigrants

are still among the poorest in the country. Immigration has also become all the more important in light of the events of September 11th, where undocumented immigrants are further marginalized, criminalized and alienated from the basic rights of citizens in a civil society. The vulnerability of the Mexican immigrant in the United States makes the study of their religious experience all the more significant, as it can deepen, enrich and challenge traditional understandings of such experience.

My particular research has focused on a contextualized understanding of the religious experience of these immigrants and their particular theological self understanding. While much work has been done on the issue of immigration from a political, economic, cultural and sociological perspective, almost none has looked at theological dimensions of immigration and the phenomenology of the religious experience of these immigrants. Of all those on the margins of society in the United States, the immigrant poor are among the most vulnerable. Each day thousands seek to climb daunting mountains, traverse waterless deserts and swim across dangerous canals in order to enter

the United States and work at jobs that no one else in the country wants. Because of political policies in the last seven years which have channeled the immigrant flows into life-threatening territories, an immigrant a day on average has died trying to cross the border U.S. Mexican border. It is ironic that while many Americans hailed the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, they scarcely notice the walls being constructed between the affluence of North America and the poor of South America.  Between 1961 and 1989, in the hope of finding a better life and a more promising future on the other side of the Berlin Wall, 80 people were killed, 59 of them were shot dead by East German guards who protected the border. Between 1995 and 2002, in the hope of finding a better life and a more promising future in the United States, more than 2,200 immigrants have died trying to cross the U.S.-Mexican border.

As we look more closely at the lives of these immigrants, what religious experience, if any, emerges? How does a more systematic reflection on their pains and hopes give new understanding to traditional notions of religious experience? How does a deeper knowledge of tradition help us interpret the religious experience of these immigrants?

The starting point for my research has been the concrete experience of the Mexican, immigrant poor in the United States, Gaudium et Spes, and the last judgment in Matthew 25. Gaudium et Spes notes that the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ (no. 1). The starting point for understanding the religious experience means reflection precisely from the context from which these immigrants live. In a more pointed way, Jesus in Matthew s gospel points to his presence in the presence of the poor when he says, I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, [36] naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me (Matthew 25:35-36). Since immigrants in U.S. society are often the ones who are hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick and imprisoned in detention centers, I believe their experiences give us particularly profound insight into Christology and the presence of the crucified Christ today. Their faith amidst tremendous forces of adversity give witness to the enduring power of their religious beliefs. Their griefs and anxieties of the immigrant poor in the United States give us a unique understanding of religious experience in America today, especially as we analyze it from the crossroads of prosperity and poverty in Southern California.

My proposal is to present a paper on one group of Mexican immigrants in Coachella Valley, California. I would like to begin with a brief contexualization of immigration in America today, and then look more concretely at the religious experience of this community of immigrants as it emerges from a four day retreat program that is particularly correlated with their immigrant experience the dynamics of Christian revelation. After this contextualization and description of their experience, I would like to comment briefly on one aspect from the tradition, namely that of the notion of conversion, and explore some of its rich contours in the context of the Mexican immigrant experience. Drawing on my recent book, Border of Death, Valley of Life, this paper seeks present a hermeneutical circle whereby the religious experience of the poor gives new insight into tradition and where tradition gives a new way of understanding the life of the poor.

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In today’s globalized world the awareness of the destructive impact of murderous conflicts has grown. It invites Christians to re-articulate their thought on revelation in its hermeneutically interconnected aspects of the experience of God today and the reference to God’s presence in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. Such re-articulation is urgent as it may suggest perspectives for conflict resolution on a broader than Christian scale.

After some preliminary remarks on contemporary mediations of revelation and of the experience of God, I will concentrate on the the notion « option for the poor » and the meaning of the word « poor », particularly in the context of violent conflicts. The growing attention paid to restorative justice offers the possibility for a better articulation of the concept of « victim » from the perspective of the conflict community (i.e. the community built by all those who are involved in a conflict, be it from close by or from far away). This suggests, in theology, a renewed reflection on otherness from the perspective of belonging to a (conflict) community and, therefore, the elaboration of a christology that emphasizes kenosis from the perspective of God’s Reign.

"The Role of the Visual and Metaphoric in the Rhetoric of Religious Experience"

In recent writings I have explored the cognitive role that the rhetoric of metaphor plays in science and religion and how visual images function as markers for religious identity in high or popular culture. I have argued that the rhetoric of language and visual images shapes Christian religious life in concrete, historical ways. Christian ‘religious experience’ is never without words or images. The Christian theological focus on the Incarnated Christ and the Sacraments makes this inevitable.

In this paper, I intend to explore and interrelate two example of the rhetoric that establishes religious experience. One of these will be literary, one visual. I will address the claims that the religious experience in The Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous mystical text of the fourteenth century, aims at and articulates a wordless, invisible union with the Divine. In contrast, the intensely dramatic vision of Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ (Pinacoteca Vatican, 1603-04) will be viewed. The latter functioned as an altarpiece in the Vittrici Chapel, S.M. in Vallicella, the ‘Chiesa Nuova’ of the Oratorian Fathers until the original painting was moved to the museum and a copy was put in its place.

Both these literary and the visual artifacts invite participation into a religious experience. The paper will study the two expressions, discuss their attempts to persuade the reader/listener and viewer to ‘experience’ what they convey; and to evaluate the interrelationship of words and images in a cognitional theory of religious experience. The paper will attempt to understand the content and shape of the ‘experience’ of God that each artifact claims for itself. It will also try to establish the conditions under which it might be possible to determine the truth of such claims.

Zur Erschaffung der Eva (unter Bezugnahme auf u.a. Michelangelo, Barth und Irigaray)

Die religionsphilosophischen Entwürfe der "französischen" Philosophin und Psychoanalytikerin Luce Irigaray können als ein gutes Beispiel für die Entwicklung eines zeitgenössischen Religionsbegriffs betrachtet werden. Anknüpfend an klassische und moderne religionskritische Theorien - einerseits philosofischer Art (Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Derrida) und andererseits psychonalaytischer Richtung (Freud und Lacan) - entfaltet sie nicht nur eine Kritik traditioneller ("phallogozentrisch" geprägter) Religiösität, sondern entwickelt darüber hinaus auch einen eigenständigen Begriff einer noch neuen, weitgehend noch unbekannten ("weiblichen") Religiösität. Hierbei spielt die Berufung auf die im traditionellen Diskurs bislang verschwiegende sogenannte weibliche Erfahrung, aber auch deren Relativierung eine wichtige Rolle. Die Relativierung (nicht Abweisung) des Erfahrungsbegriffs wird meines Erachtens mindestens aus zwei Quellen gespeist, nämlich einerseits aus dem (post)strukturalistischen Hintergrund Irigarays und andererseits mithilfe des in erster Linie doch theologischen Begriffs der Offenbarung.

In meinem Beitrag möchte ich zunächst sowohl die Religionskritik Irigarays als auch ihren eigenen, zeitgenössischen Begriff "weiblicher" Religiösität darstellen. Hierbei möchte ich in kritischer Auseinandersetzung mit diversen anderen Irigarayinterpretationen insbesondere die in Irigarays Oeuvre verborgene Relativierung der (weiblichen) Erfahrung, aber auch ihr nicht nur kritisches, sondern durchaus auch positives Verhältnis zu traditionellen Religionskritiken darstellen.

Insofern diese traditionellen Religionskritiken von der neuzeitlichen Theologie verarbeitet worden sind – so meine erste vorläufige These – verdient gerade auch die zeitgenössische Religionskritik Irigarays eine theologische Reflektion. Darüber hinaus – so meine zweite vorläufige These – fordert gerade der von Irigaray positiv entwickelte Begriff zeitgenössischer Religiösität die theologische Reflektion heraus. Anhand der von Karl Barth im zweiten Römerbrief entwickelten Interpretation der Evafigur von Michelangelos "Erschaffung der Eva" werde ich die Herausforderung annehmen und im Anschluss an die neuere (!) Barthdisskusion gerade diese zweite These näher zu entwickeln versuchen.

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Affirmation and Confirmation. Jean Nabert and Pneumatology

The French philosopher Jean Nabert has introduced the notion of an ‘originary affirmation’ as a founding experience for human consciousness. This affirmative experience creates a search for the Absolute and a desire for God in the human subject. Post-modern philosophy questions the possibility of such a fundamental affirmation (cf. Derrida’s criticism of Michel de Certeau). Another problem is, how such an experience that precedes all actual experiences relates to concrete experiences. In other words, how does a fundamental affirmation relate to concrete confirmations of human experiences of the divine?

These problems are juxtaposed to the theological field of pneumatology. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit provides the theologian with the possibilities to express the experience of God and the human longing for God. However, does the activity of the Spirit proceed from an Absolute (‘God the Father’) or is it laid down in a concrete, historical manifestation (‘Jesus Christ’), and how do these relate to each other? We consider the question: what does a pneumatological discussion (like the ‘filioque’ problem) imply for the philosophical problem of affirmation and confirmation in human experience, and vice versa? Furthermore, what does pneumatology contribute to a theological epistemology of experience?

Why We Still Need William James 

Last year marked the celebration of the 100^th birthday of the publication of "The Varieties of Religious Experience." Many scholars have revisited these classic Gifford Lectures in recent years. The recent Gifford lectures of both Stanley Hauerwas and David Tracy revisit at James in critical and constructive ways. Hauerwas is quite critical of the account of religious experience offered by James. Tracy is more appreciative. Attending to both Hauerwas and Tracy and their readings of James, I will move beyond their critiques, and offer my own commentary on why contemporary theologians still need William James and his psychological work on human experience in our own projects of constructive theology.

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This paper will probe the question, what about religious experience whose content or object is not specifically Christian, much less officially promoted, yet does occur within Christian lives?

Examples would be: 1.) the experience Francis of Assisi had of kinship with natural realities as fellow creatures; 2.) the experience of harmony gained by Christians along with Buddhists or Hindus practicing Zen or yoga; 3.) contemporary Christian and non-Christian experience of non-human nature as somehow sacred.

The question at issue is intrinsic to the very concept of 'religious experience' within Western Christianity. Generic, philosophical concepts of 'religion' and 'experience' often have been focussed on specifically Christian content (e.g. Schleiermacher, James, Rahner, Lonergan, Berger, Tracy, Buckley).

Substantive analysis will focus on only 3.) above. An experience of nature and cosmos as somehow sacred occurs in Christians, non-Christians ('eco-spirituality') and even in the professedly non-religious (Goodenough). Ignoring the issue concedes theological ground to believers, church leaders and theologians--Protestant and Catholic--who already think that the most authentic Christian witness to post-modern, religiously pluralist, possibly post-Christian cultures is solely to magnify a 'Christian difference' from all others (Mudge, Sirico).

Methodological reflection will ask, how can theology deal with religious experience that overlaps the Christian/non-Christian boundary in a way that is authentically Christian yet open to new possibilities?

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What the Daughter Knows: Luce Irigaray and Re-thinking Women's Religious Experience

This paper seeks to contribute to on-going discussion of theological epistemology through a critical use of the work of Luce Irigaray. Although hers is not a religious project, Irigaray connects concepts of God with women's struggles for personal and social autonomy. She moves beyond de Beauvoir's acceptance of women trapped in immanence. As Irigaray develops conditions of possibility for transformation, she emphasizes female subjectivity, embodied desire, and the significance of the daughter -mother genealogy in women's experience of transcendence. In the present order, the daughter has no place of her own, since the dominant symbolic system relates her to the Law of the Father as virgin, wife, or mother. To change that order, daughters need a different way of being, not only in relation to their mothers but also to the divine.

Irigaray's insights challenge us to recast questions of religious experience, God, and work for justice by linking together the carnal (sensible) and the transcendental. I will draw forward recent assessments of Irigaray in feminist theory and theology by developing three interrelated points: sexual bodied reality, proper interiority, and strategies for transformation. Building on feminist theoretical and theological critiques, I maintain that grappling with sexual difference is a necessary but not sufficient condition for rethinking women’s religious experience.

I will conclude with two points of intersection between the work of Irigaray and emerging directions among U.S. third wave feminists. These twenty-first century daughters, conscious of the ambiguities and contradictions within feminism and religion, are re-defining their relationship with both. Like Irigaray, they too are "militants of the impossible." Can they find within the tradition any theological affirmation of their desires and their difference(s)?

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The Church’s Memory of Jesus: Known/Held ‘Deep into the Bone’

Classic epistemologies focus on the intellect, the mental processes of abstraction and conceptualization, reflection and analysis. The modern ‘turn’ to the subject and to the category of experience, however, has effected a broadened understanding of what it means to know. Certainly any reconceptualization of the notion "religious experience" must take into account the insights of a variety of academic disciplines.

The sociology of knowledge, for example, calls attention to the corporate – and embedded -- character of what we know and how we know it. According to this, knowledge is embodied in both communities and individuals. Per Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, society creates all "that passes for knowledge"; yet at the same time, human community is only made possible, it is actually constituted by the sharing in a body of knowledge commonly held. For our interests, Maurice Halbwachs theory of collective memory presents memory as a particular, indispensable form of social knowing.

For its part, ritual theory presents corporeal, bodily experience as a significant mode of human knowing. In explaining ritual’s specific noetic functions, T.W. Jennings suggests that a community’s rites provide the means by which its constitutive knowledges are embedded and thus borne/carried/mediated through the generations in and by the physical bodies of its individual members. And, he notes, what is apprehended in ritual participation is something felt and bodily engaged. Ritual theory thus calls attention to the felt, qualitative dimension of knowing and the known. This requires a reconsideration as well as a re-valuing of the truth of that apprehended in sensory experience, that known as personal feeling/meaning.

Drawing on these theses from social theory, this paper will consider how the Christian community "knows" Jesus Christ. It will examine the collective memory of Jesus that constitutes the Christian ecclesial community and indicate how this shared remembrance inscribed in Christian ritual practice is mediated to believers ‘deep into the bone’. The objective here will be to show that via ritual, individuals not only come to a true knowledge of Jesus, they also move ever more deeply into a personally felt, shared experience of the reality of Christ. Indeed, it is only by ritual participation in the ecclesial collective memory of Jesus that believers are able to name and claim their present experience of Christ as the church’s Risen Lord.

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Not One Without the Other: Conceptions of "Language" and "Religious Experience"

This paper proposes to frame and address a contemporary problem in systematic theology. This problem, generally considered, centers on the perichoresis between one’s understanding of human language and how one frames "religious experience." One’s understanding of language will directly effect one’s understanding of religious experience and vice versa.

The problem that drives this inquiry is the contradiction between Friedrich Schleiermacher’s "turn to the subject" and how it understands religious experience and its relation to language and its postmodern critique. This paper will thus be comprised of three "moments."

The first will quickly summarize Schleiermacher’s view of language, his particular understanding of experience, and his conception of the purpose of theology for its existence.

The second moment will summarize how two prominent American postmoderns, George Lindbeck and Wayne Proudfoot treat those same issues. The "topics" that emerge from the intersection of Schleiermacher’s project and the postmodern critique provide the basis for a thematic comparison on [1] the understanding of the human subject/experience and [2] the relationship between language and experience.

The third moment will suggest two possibilities for moving beyond the modern/postmodern dichotomy. George Steiner will offer a possibility for moving beyond the more radical anthropological elements of the postmodern critique. Karl Rahner will indicate one theological alternative that is sensitive both to the postmodern critique as well as to the nature of a foundational theology. This alternative provides one response to what is today an outstanding contradiction in contemporary examinations of "religious experience."

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Flesh, Chiasm, Providence

1. For so much pre-modern thought, there is no distinction between the divinity’s creation of the universe and maintaining of the universe. Thus, from the Stoics (e.g., Posidonius, Cicero), to the early Fathers (e.g., Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Origin), to the Christian Platonists (e.g., John of Damascus, Eriugena), this ‘principle of preservation’ is always implicit, occasionally explicit, in any conception of the deity. With medieval thought, the principle of conservatio becomes subject to sustained systematic consideration: as book 3 of Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles and q.104 of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae seek to establish, preservation is providential; God continues to ‘hold’ the world in its every moment.

2. For modernity, mechanics and physics render such notions otiose and anachronistic: the principle of the conservation of energy can explain how any natural body might keep itself in being, and so ‘perseverance’ in no sense implies providence. The immediate consequence is the deist conception of a divine creator (of ‘matter in motion’) who is subsequently uninvolved and disinterested; the longer term consequence is a substantial contribution to the emerging assumption of a desacralized, ‘disenchanted’ cosmos.

3. This paper seeks to revisit the issue of conservatio, but to do so in strictly phenomenological (rather than theological or metaphysical) terms. Although the starting point for this examination comes from Edith Stein’s Endliches und Ewiges Sein, the main body of the paper will draw on two perhaps surprising sources: Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic understanding of the Flesh; and Michel Henry’s analysis of ‘auto-affection’. The point is not so much to provide a scholarly expication or assessment of these remarkable high-points of French phenomenology; it is more to see whether their work might help shed light on the issue of an always presupposed ‘sustentive Being’.

4. Specifically, I shall draw on the unique kind of reflexivity which Merleau-Ponty and Henry develop (a development which itself owes much to the later Husserl’s investigations of an operative (fungierende) proto-intentionality). For—albeit in different ways—Merleau-Ponty and Henry both seem to uncover an experience which does not refer stricto sensu to any object, nor to any ek-static, self-transcending process, nor to fulfilled, active intentionality. Instead, each deals with an immediacy which is not the result or achievement of my reflection: it is as if they gesture towards a certain structure in which there can be no gap between our life and its ‘condition’. Thus the question I shall consider here is whether—despite their own intentions—Merleau-Ponty and Henry might help us to think the ‘sustentive Being’, the irrecusable conservatio, which, as the pre-moderns realized, we must always presuppose yet can never know as such. Might it be that the passivity which Merleau-Ponty and Henry indicate, through notions such as ‘perceptual faith’, ‘reversibility’, ‘complicity’, or ‘invisible revelation’, sheds light on an apparently archaic and largely forgotten understanding of the human—as ens ab alio?

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Experiencing God in Brokenness: the Self-emptying of the Holy Spirit in Moltmann's Pneumatology

This paper will explore the idea that the Holy Spirit’s identity as Giver of Life and as the love of God poured into our hearts entails suffering in, with, and from the world in bearing its history of brokenness and incompleteness. This will provide a basis for construing human brokenness with reference to the activity of the Spirit and thus as a central locus of religious experience.

Clues to this interpretation can be found in a significant development in Jürgen Moltmann’s pneumatology. For Moltmann, the critical theological issue is the nature of God’s involvement in the event of the cross: if God is truly God, the divine involvement extends to the furthest depths of human brokenness. As he returns again and again to this theme, the role of the Holy Spirit becomes more and more important. Whereas in his earlier work the Spirit is depicted merely as the "fruit" of the mutual passion of Father and Son, his subsequent work gives the Spirit an increasingly central role in empowering, mediating, and bearing that passion. This deepening insight is also reflected elsewhere in his theology, with stress on the Spirit’s presence and passion in laboring to bring about the fullness of life for all creation.

In tracing this development, it will be thought-provoking to examine the implications of the Spirit’s role in personifying the love and compassion of God and in "spending" itself to sustain and heal the world in its brokenness. As a primary mediation of the presence of God, this "self-emptying" of the Spirit opens up an important dimension of religious experience.

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"William James's Three Criteria of Religious Truth: Immediate Luminousness and the Theological Significance of Religious Experience"

In the first chapter of his now classic, "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, William James presents a cryptic description of three criteria, immediate luminousness ("the character of inner happiness in the thoughts which stamp them as good") philosophical reasonableness (" the consistency with our other opinions") and moral helpfulness ("their serviceability for our needs") In "James’s Three Criteria and the Problem of the Ethics of Belief," I will:

1. Summarize how James expands upon and deploys these three criteria within the text of Varieties itself 

2. Scan other texts in the Jamesian corpus that amplify this summary and interpretation (especially "Principles of Psychology," "Pragmatism," and three essays from James’s Will to Believe collection ("Reflex Arc and Theism, The Sentiment of Rationality, and The Will to Believe." 

3. Suggest the outlines of an interpretive strategy of critical retrieval of the three criteria in relation to contemporary theology, philosophy and social scientific thought, by Specifying the relations among the three criteria as being tensive rather than additive (judgments of religious truth-for James "spiritual judgments-are not a result of applying the criteria in linear, sequential fashion. Rather James places the three in a series of tensive relationships, sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic. 

4. Argue that a critical retrieval of the criterion of immediate luminousness(I will rename this criterion "mediated immediacy") will clarify how intense religious experiences such as those associated with radical conversation experience and certain forms of mystical experience might be understood in relation to the other two criteria (empowerment and apperception-the renamed criteria of moral helpfulness and philosophical reasonableness) in order 
a. challenge recent philosophical (eg. Katz, Proudfoot) and theological (eg.Hauerwas, Lindbeck) who either argue or imply that intense religious experience is a function of the cognitive mediation that precedes without 
b. surrendering to the presupposition that intense religious experiences are in and of themselves self-validating and beyond critique.

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Theology, Spirituality, and the Role of Experience in Karl Rahner

Against the background of a growing rapprochement between theology and spirituality, this article/lecture examines the links between spirituality and theology in the work of Karl Rahner. It will be argued that, in Rahner, the boundaries between the two are quite fluid and that his theology has a mystagogical character. His assumption that theological reflection needs to be built on a living experience of faith will lead, in a second section, to a discussion of Rahner’s understanding of the notion of experience and its role in his theology. A final section will look at some criticisms of Rahner’s transcendental method and their implications for spirituality, while at the same time asking whether it is possible to re-read Rahner in a more post-modern, even non-foundationalist key. In this context some affinities between Rahner and Levinas will be discussed.

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Undoing the Experience of God in Sheehan’s Heideggerian Atheology

Thomas Sheehan has argued forcefully against mistaking the experience of human transcendence for an experience of God. He advocates a rigorous "atheology" that resolutely focuses on human openness itself and that emphatically resists all attempts to conceive transcendence as indicative of some further horizon. In Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (1987), Sheehan finds indications that Rahner retrieved something of this insight from Heidegger, but Sheehan concludes that Rahner’s language because of its metaphysical and theological "baggage" ultimately "falls behind his insights." This philosophical stance is supported by Sheehan’s many substantial studies of Heidegger and it undergirds his controversial and popular account of Jesus in The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986).

My paper will focus on Sheehan’s essay "From Divinity to Infinity" in The Once and Future Jesus (2000). This article provocatively argues that "Christianity’s original sin is to think it is about God." The first section of my paper will demonstrate that while Sheehan’s undoing of the experience of God precludes a metaphysical conception of God and an affirmation of Jesus divinity, it purports not to deny God or to reject the authenticity of Jesus’ radical stance. Hence, although Sheehan argues against a "transcendent" God, he nevertheless seems to find through his employment of Heidegger’s thought a way to speak of God and about Jesus’ significance. This recent article, in particular, reveals either that Sheehan’s crucial conceptual moves are metaphoric and that this is for the most part implicit rather than explicit, or that he is equivocating when his "atheology" insists that Christianity is not about God. The paper will conclude by asking whether analogous implicit metaphoric moves on Rahner’s part explain his indifference to the "ousiological" slips which trouble Sheehan. If the logic of Sheehan’s position entails analogous conceptual moves and if Sheehan’s critique overlooks these moves in Rahner’s thought does this signal a possible undoing of Sheehan’s atheological interpretation of Rahner and Jesus?

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Religious Experience, Religion and Senior High School Students: Implications for Religious Education

The paper will present the result of recent research work on the level of religious experience and attitude to formal religion among senior students in Brisbane Archdiocesan Colleges.

The theory behind the research is built on the work of the Alistair Hardy Research Centre (U.K.) and of Hay (1987). This work centred on the question, asked in various ways:

‘ Have you ever been aware of, or influenced by, a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?’

To approach the question in a different format, the research used an extensive open-ended survey administered senior high school students. The instrument was designed to divorce questions on such experiences from the term "religious", although individuals might indeed interpret them as "religious". It was designed first to determine the extent of recognition of such experiences among the students and second to examine whether factors such as home background, regular religious practice, type of school, subject choice or co-curricula activities may make a difference in enhancing the awareness of such experience.

It was also designed to compare results with work by Flynn (1975, 1985, 1993) who highlighted the factors above as influencing student achievement. Flynn made connections to religious practice and attitudes to church but not to religious experience as such. Robinson and Jackson (1987) had undertaken extensive research in Great Britain that also has important parallels to this work.

Exploratory analyses of the data suggest possible directions for further research into adolescent spirituality and the way in which expressed values and attitudes relate to the personal approach to spirituality. They also highlight some of the conflict between the reality of these experiences for students and their experience of institutional religion.

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"Religious Experience - Reality or Illusion: Insights from Symeon the New Theologian and Ignatius of Loyola"

This paper will concentrate on the role of human imagination in religious experience. In what sense can it be a source of "religious knowledge"and in what sense can it provide us only with a mirror image of ourselves?

Two traditional approaches will be examined, first that of Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), whose analysis of prayer and insights into "what is happenning in prayer" have exercised a big influence on Orthodox spirituality and the religious epistemology embedded in it. Secondly the insights of Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) into our life with God, represented in particular by his Spiritual Exercises, will be examined. In the comparison of these Orthodox and Catholic classics the main concentration will be on the issues of spiritual progress, and in particular,the role of imagination in spiritual progress - stagnation or regress.

For Symeon imagination plays the negative role. It leads a person to "imagine what cannot be imagined", to creating idols, obstacles on one’s spiritual journey, illusions, which can have mentally destructive effects. For Ignatius imagination plays a constructive role, helping a person towards integration in the service of God, and it enables the person to work with faith, and to prepare oneself for the experiences of the encounter with God, and it gives a language to grasp these encounters, evaluate and communicate them.

How do Symeon and Ignatius help us to differentiate between religious experience and religious illusion? Are their approaches to spiritual progress and to imagination dependent on other elements in their traditional horizons (Orthodox; Catholic), which should not be neglected when we try to learn from them?

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La théologie catholique et l’insertion de la catégorie d’expérience au concile Vatican II. Analyses conceptuelles

Les travaux du groupe de recherche international sur l’histoire du concile Vatican II, dont la Faculté de théologie de Leuven est un membre actif, ont démontré comment l’herméneutique théologique moderne est venue déterminer profondément les textes conciliaires et a détrôné, par le fait même, la place qu’occupait la théologie néo-scolastique.

La catégorie onto-théologique, à partir de laquelle on interprétait la relation à Dieu, la connaissance de la révélation, la naissance et la croissance du peuple de Dieu, a perdu de sa plausibilité, laissant place à une prise en compte plus grande de la densité historique. Dans ce contexte, la catégorie d’expérience est particulièrement représentative de ce renversement. On la retrouve à 62 reprises dans les documents conciliaires –experientia, experentiae, experientiam, experientias, experimentum, experimenta, experimentis, experimento, experior, experiatur, experitur, experiuntur– (réf. P. Tombeur, Concilium Vaticanum II, 1974). Le sens que revêt l’utilisation de la catégorie d’expérience est varié. De manière générale, il semble qu’on puisse les distinguer sous les trois grandes variations du concept d’expérience en allemand, à savoir Erfahrung, Erlebnis et Experiment.

Notre communication sera un travail de théologie historique. Faisant l’exégèse des diverses utilisations de la catégorie d’expérience à l’aide des Acta synodalia, nous chercherons à en restituer les significations théologiques et à évaluer l’importance du concept dans la théologie conciliaire.

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God Naked: The Experience of Place, the Violence of Banality, and a Pornography of Excess at the Mall of America, Walt Disney World, and the American Suburban Home

Every theology operates with either an explicit or an implicit answer to questions of location or place. In my forthcoming book, God’s Clothing: A Theology of Place (Brazos Press, Fall 2003) I seek first to make the implicit explicit in a cultural critique of the theological experience of typical "sacred places" in America, and then seek to "clothe" God in places of grace, drawn from biblical revelation and Christian tradition. My paper at LEST II ("God’s Clothing: Living Waters and the Limits of Post-modernity"), drew upon the second section of the book; this paper draws upon the first.

As evident in sheer numbers of devotees, citizens of the United States are drawn as pilgrims to places where the violence of banality and/or a pornography of excess constitutes the primal theologies of place operative in any "experience" of them. I take "experience" here to be a category of language, whereby corporate and personal fabrications are articulated in a public forum. Such public articulation is the medium by which any experience must be validated. Without it, any "experience" is purely (and properly) private.

Among these banal and pornographic places are the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and the suburban home—especially as the latter involves inhabitants in rituals (or images) of domestic sanitation and lawncare. At each place, an interweaving and confusion of poetics and politics, public and private, disorients pilgrims into attaching themselves to language formulas (such as the word "experience" itself), practices, and objects that transfer their authentic desires for intimacy, agency, and integrity onto commodities. At the same time, however, the commodities are advertised as innocent of their relation to supply and demand, and function instead as mimetic orienting symbols or icons of "love," "progress," "salvation," and so forth. Such confusion masks and perpetuates the systemic violence that has riddled American Protestant cultures since the first genocidal attacks on native cultures were justified in the seventeenth-century.

Needless to say, the "experiences" of such places are subject to a cultural critique that exposes their failure to live up to what they promise—either in terms of agency or intimacy, and that opens the prospect of a way beyond the violence of banality and a pornography of excess in which intimacy, agency, and integrity flourish under the limits of a "theology of enough." Such flourishing is the fruit of salvation not by corporate product, but as a consequence of justification by grace through participation in place, where God is clothed not as a commodity—whether a cartoon rodent or a luxury home matters not at all, but preeminently in the simple metaphors of place revealed in Tanakh and the Writings about Christ.

The Necessity of Experience

The discipline of theological anthropology has been much called upon in postmodernity to illuminate the ground of the moral in human experience and to offer practical guidance for the full attainment of its potential. This has intensified the debate concerning the attempt to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ and the relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge. This paper will examine Martin Rhonheimer’s recent claim that ‘cooperation between metaphysical anthropology and philosophical ethics is not only a possibility: it is practically unavoidable’. Such an understanding of the necessity of experience will be investigated in the light of Martin Heidegger’s question whether in this way we experience essentially enough das Wesen der Wahrheit. His consideration of the experience of necessity on the other hand reveals the ungroundedness of the moral as this has unfolded in western thinking and opens up the proper possibility of phronesis in another way.

Adventure and Romance in a Charismatic Movement: Reading Religious Experience in the ‘Toronto Blessing’

In the summer of 1996, the author visited the source of the ‘Toronto Blessing’, spending more than fifty hours at meetings of the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, and talking with adherents and participants. Conducting ethnographic research through the lens of pilgrimage, the study explored the work of the fellowship and assessed its popularity within the context of contemporary revivalism. The study was published in Religion (1998, volume 28, issue 3), and concentrated on the distinctive romantic grammar of assent that formed the theological construction of reality for participants.

In the fall of 2002, the author returned to the fellowship to conduct further research, and specifically to examine the changing nature of the religious experience of its adherents. After the millennium, and with many failed predictions of global revival, how did the fellowship cope with its own declining numbers and a withering international support-base, with its unfulfilled hopes, and with the non-reification of its visions? How did it now understand and regard its intense religious experiences and spiritual awakening? The paper will argue that the highly unusual religious experience of believers is shaped by their distinctive forms of worship, and not by formal doctrine or creeds, and that this pervades the movement as a whole. Using the theoretical framework of James Hopewell (drawn from the field of Congregational Studies), and insights from practical and Systematic theology, the research conducted suggests that this charismatic fellowship persists in being adaptive, in spite of the obvious loss of its popularity and influence, continuing to offer a viable experiential resource within global revivalism that emphasises the importance of romantic (spiritual) adventure in religious knowledge and praxis.

Which Experiences? Whose Interpretation? Contributions of Asian Theologies to Theological Epistemology

Ever since the "anthropological turn" in modernity, human experience has been proposed as the starting point for all theoretical reflections. Given the historical nature of Christianity, Christian theology, perhaps more than any other academic discipline, needs to be rooted in concrete religious experiences of the individual believer and the community of faith. Indeed, this methodological startting point has been adopted by various brands of liberation theology.

While there is a broad consensus on this general requirement in theological epistemology, there is serious disagreement among contemporary theologians as to (1) what counts as religious experience, (2) which religious experiences should be given priority, (3) how they are to be interpreted, and (4) whose interpretation should be accorded validity and authority.

This paper will examine these four themes from the perspective of some Asian religious traditions (mainly Buddhism and Confucianism) and selected Asian Christian theologians (mainly Choan-Seng Song and Aloysius Pieris). Under each theme it will compare and contrast the approaches of representative Western theologians with those of Asian theologians and Asian religious traditions.

The goal of the paper is to highlight the contributions of Asian theologies to a new way of doing theology and ultimately to a new way of being church.

The Communitarian Experience among the Bishops and Theologians in the Second Vatican Council as a Religious Experience: a Locus Theologicus in the Reflection of Faith

The Second Vatican Council has used the noun experientia 32 times and the verb experior 17 times. The Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes has largely drawn on the basic experiences of the humanity in its interaction with science, culture, family, politics, socio economics etc. The Constitution Dei Verbum speaks of Israel experiencing the ways of God (DV 14). The Constitution readily admits the role of experience as human beings’ response to the freely communicating God in Christ. Following this lead, John Paul II also speaks about the religious experience of the individual and society in his encyclical Dives in Misericordia.

The human experiences, many of which could be meaningfully called religious experience as they lead us to an encounter with the divine reality, can justifiably constitute a theological locus. While we reflect on the inner dynamics of the Council, we can see that in the Council, the individuals and the Church as a whole experienced the God who renews the Church. Pope John spoke of the Council as the New Pentecost of the Holy Spirit.

Although the majority of the bishops approached the Council in its preparatory phase without much direction and comprehension and almost failed to see the extraordinary nature of the event, they slowly began to experience the purpose of the Council by the end of the first session. By this time majority of the bishops began to share a common vision and experience of the aggiornamento, basically in tune with the one envisaged by Pope John. Alberigo calls this common consciousness (History of Vatican II Vol. III, p. 491). The common experience of renewal felt and lived by the bishops, theologians, Commission members and above all by the Pope himself formed the nucleus of the texts which were later written down. The communitarian experience of renewal could be rightly called as an arena of grace, a religious experience.

This communitarian experience of the Council as a possible realm of religious experience is to be further clearly studied so that in theologization, the role of such experience of bishops, priests, the laity, even those outside the Church, will be taken into consideration. One may ask how far the motto Vox Populi Vox Dei is valid in our doing of theology. We think that the communitarian event of the Council as religious experience can constitute a theological locus.

From the study of the Council, two further points to be reflected upon are: the Church’s religious experience of herself in the Council as the People of God; the Church’s readiness in the Council to acknowledge and appreciate the religious experience in other religions.

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On Seeking the Face of the God of Jacob (Psalm 24): A philosophical Midrash

Textual reasoning is a developing epistemological theme at the interphase of theology and philosophy, particularly in Jewish and Christian reflection. This paper argues that philosophical reasoning is firstly midrash. Richard A Cohen, in 'Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas', argues 'ethics operates otherwise than epistemology' (6), summoning knowledge 'to its own moral responsibilities and obligations.' Such an approach 'will strike a militantly epistemological philosophy as unjustified, excessive, indeed as "religious"' (3). But this, Cohen argues, neither reduces nor compromises a rigorous philosophical thinking. 'Rather and precisely, it means that thinking... serves a transcendence whose significance is from the first ethical and as such escapes pure epistemology' (326).

This paper intends a philosophical midrash of Jacob's encounter with God in Genesis 32 in a night of struggle. 'So Jacob was left alone, and one wrestled with him until day break' (Gen. 32:24). After a night of turmoil, Jacob wakes up, awake but wounded. Jacob thereafter becomes 'Israel' who has seen God face to face, yet his life is spared. Implicated is the question of religious epistemology as a phenomenology of that which exceeds or escapes the phenomenal.

The paper considers Janicaud criticism of the dalliance and subsequent alliance of phenomenology and theology. It draws upon the notion of the 'extravagance' of religious experience, as hinted at by Paul Moyaert in 'De mateloosheid van het christendom', and the 'phenomenon' of 'excess' and 'saturation' which Jean-Luc Marion has sought to address. It will suggest that a pure epistemology of religious experience finds itself always and already challenged and compromised by the phenomenon and phenomena of religious experience and practice within which it must situate itself.

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The "mystagogical method" in sacramentology, developed by Kathleen Hughes among others, relies on a process of systematic reflection and dialogue subsequent to the reception of one or more sacraments as a source for uncovering and articulating a theology of that sacrament rooted in a concrete sacramental event. This reflection process constitutes the final stage of the Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults, and thus claims the status of (a part of) an Ordo of the Church. What happens when the same process is applied to the lived experience of a number of persons to the liturgies of the Easter Triduum? Paradoxically, many of those surveyed show difficulty in distinguishing their unique personal experience from a simple report of what took place at the rite, although this occurs less often among those who exercised a prepared role in the liturgy, such as choir members. This paper will present the results of research on the lived experience and theological/spiritual conclusions drawn by a variety of individuals concerning the Easter liturgies of the Roman Catholic Church, and will explore the methodological parameters of research into the lived experience of liturgical rites.

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The Authority of Experience: What Counts as Experience? Whose Experience Counts? What Does Experience Count for?

In an elegant essay published in The Review of Metaphysics in 1998, Robert Sokolowski argued that A the making and the questioning of distinctions is the method of philosophy:

A [P]hilosophy is the intellectual activity that works with distinctions; its method is the making and the questioning of distinctions. Philosophy explains by distinguishing. This does not means that philosophy just asserts distinctions and lets it go at that; it works with distinctions, it brings them out and dwells on them, showing how and why the things it has distinguished must be distinguished from one another (A The Method of Philosophy, The Review of Metaphysics 51, 1998: 516).

In this paper, I propose to engage the thematic focus, "Religious Experience and Contemporary Theological Epistemology" by "bringing out" and "dwelling on" some key distinctions that deserve attention in efforts to (re-)conceptualize "religious experience" for the work of contemporary theology. I plan specifically to explore how the notion of experience functions as itself a distinction–and a multivalent one at that–in crucial strands of discourse that philosophy and theology have shaped to articulate human encounters with what is "other," whether that other be construed as the cosmos of nature, the human social cosmos, or divine otherness. As part of this exploration I will argue that attention to that from which "experience" is distinguished will be crucial in articulating notions of "religious experience" that can function effectively within theological inquiry. Texts and analyses drawn from Kant, William James, Charles Taylor, George Steiner, Louis Dupré and John E. Smith will first provide key markers of ways in which experience functions as a distinction and then offer resources for articulating the significance of this function for constructing an appropriate contemporary conceptualization of "religious experience."

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Experience, Goods, and Natural Law: Particular to Someone Everywhere

In a recent article, Martin McKeever notes, "amid the oceanic bibliography on postmodernism there is a noticeable dearth of studies which spell out the implications of postmodernism for ethics as a discipline" (Studia Moralia 40/1 [June 2002] 238). An interesting question for ethics in general, and Catholic natural law ethics in particular, is the impact of postmodernism on the role and function of experience in natural law ethical theory. Natural law claims that through human experience, and rational reflection on human experience, we can come to know God’s divine law and its implications for moral behavior. With postmodern critiques of foundationalism and shared human experience, is there any theological basis for claims of natural law (i.e., universal moral truth)? In this paper, I will investigate the two predominant interpretations of natural law in Catholic moral theology, revisionism and the BGT, and the hermeneutics of experience in either theory. While revisionists have responded to postmodern critiques on the role and function of experience in ethical theory, I hope to further that contribution by providing a hermeneutics of experience that responds to postmodernist challenges towards foundationalist ethical theories grounded in experience.

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Trans-intentionality of Religious Experience

The problem to be discussed is as follows: experience is characterized by intentionality, i.e. related to an object. Therefore Levinas contests the possibility of talking about religious experience. The Other(God)cannot be the correlate of human consciousness. Thus we are faced with a problem: the term religious experience is generally used, but according to Levinas this cannot be done.

In my solution I'll examine first the term religious experience. Then, from a hermeneutical-phenomelogical point of view I'll show that intentionality applies indeed to the relation of man with God, but this does not necessarily mean abandoning the term religious experience. By means of a stratified concept of religious experience I'll defend the trans-intentionality of religious experience.

Finally I'll discuss the question whether there are criteria to evaluate the validity of the stratified religious experience.

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Blessing, Experience and/or (Biblical) Tradition: A Response to RA. Jensen

Influenced by C. Westermann (1979), the Lutheran theologian RA. Jensen (1981) states that Israel experienced God not only as Saviour, but also as a God of Blessing. According to Jensen, this is so crucial, that the totality of humanity’s experience of God cannot be understood "unless we incorporate the experience of the blessing God into that understanding" (p. 232). Blessing, as "a fundamental mode of experiencing the work of God that makes human life possible", is in his view, in contrast with the experience of a Saving God, a universal human experience (p. 232).

Though "blessing" is an important biblical theme indeed, Jensen’s underlying presuppositions about experience and tradition are debatable. Jensen lifts out one aspect of a biblical concept and generalises it into a universal experience. Many questions arise which are part of the theme of the LEST conference. For instance: What about the relation between experience (of being blessed) and tradition (based on a particular sacred book, which contains both the image of a blessing God and of blessing people)? How to define experience if blessing is not only a feeling of being blessed by God but also a human act directed to other human beings as well as towards God? What about the so-called "universalistic" nature of the experience of a blessing God? Can the Jewish Christian belief in a God, Creator of all, be equated by the experience of all of this Creator God? Should we not take into consideration more aspects of our contemporary society (such as religious plurality, the impact of technology, globalisation etc.) when dealing with matters of human experience and theology? These questions will be dealt with in dialogue with the recent views of D. Greiner (1998) and ML Frettlöh (1998) on blessing and contemporary theology.

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Nature of Mysticism in Jan van Ruusbroec and Willem Jordaens

According to Denys Turner in his study The Darkness of God. Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and others, our  modern understanding of mysticism differs radically from the patristic or medieval understanding of mystical theology. Some time during the fourteenth century - the period too when a chasm develops between mysticism and academic theology - mysticism becomes increasingly defined in experiential, psychologising and even privatised terms, whereas previously traditional apophatic theology (from the time of Gregory of Nyssa and the Pseudo-Dionysius to the time of Meister Eckhart) entailed an implicit critique of understanding union with God in terms that somehow appear to infringe on the divine transcendence.Given this general background, I hope to examine the work of two Flemish mystical theologians, namely, Jan van Ruusbroec and Willem Jordaens, his colleague at Groenendaal. This should prove interesting for at least two reasons. First, Ruusbroec describes in extremely vivid manner the experientialism of what he calls "the natural way." For instance, in The Four Temptations we find the following description of this kind of natural mediation: "These people's way is a quiet sitting down of the body without work, with idle, unimaged sensuality turned inward into themselves. Because they are without practice and do not cling to God in love they do not go beyond themselves but rest idle in their own essence. And so their essence is their idol for they think they have and are one essence with God, and that is impossible." This kind of natural mysticism - a non-theistic practice of meditation, which has been compared (with or without justification) by some scholars to Buddhist practices - will be discussed in some detail as it illustrates the changing nature of mysticism. Second, I will explore how Ruusbroec and Jordaens approach this kind of meditation, and show how they draw upon the theology of the Trinity to critique it. Doing this will allow me to make a more general point, namely to show how Trinitarian theology shapes the nature of meditative practices and contemplation of God with two authors of the late medieval period. Ruusbroec and Jordaens stand at the end of a long tradition of "classic" mystical theology, which was changing in nature as they wrote. They both chronicle and criticise the new experientialism, drawing on traditional-theological resources that soon were to become alien in the early-modern climate in which the Devotio Moderna was to flourish.

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"Our ‘Father’", who are (only) in our epistemologies......? To reach beyond the limits of our own epistemic traditions.

The more recent proposed epistemological models [cf Gregersen & Van Huyssteen (eds). Rethinking Theology and Science (1998)] within the context of the science and religion debate, have opened up galaxies of meaning on the interface of the debates which are inviting for explorative, theological travelling. But how are we epistemologically to judge not only our journeys, but also the rethinking of the implications of these epistemological models for our understanding of religious experience and our experience of transcendence? The interdisciplinary space that has been opened up in an exciting post-foundationalist manner within these very debates, leaves us as rational persons, embedded within a very specific social and historical context, with the haunting cognitive pluralist question on how to reach beyond the limits of our own epistemic traditions (Wentzel van Huyssteen). For me it is the question: How is "Our ‘Father’" more than our epistemologies?

From an awareness of the many-layered reality of our experiences, three interrelated concepts, namely remembering, imagination and hope, are cross-connectingly employed in a tentative manner within this open-up interdisciplinary space to give theological content to this "reach beyond the limits of our own epistemic traditions". It is - on the one hand - an effort to unmask epistemic arrogance. It is however also - on the other hand - an effort not to take refuge in the insular comfort of internally (theologically) closed language-systems. It is an effort to address relativism and a "twentieth-century despair of any knowledge of reality" (Polkinghorne). It is an effort - in the words of John Polkinghorne - to do theology as "metaphysics practised in the presence of God". It is finally, an effort to conceptually revisit our understandings of our cultural embedded religious experiences.

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The Shift of the Particulars of the Specific

A significant shift has taken place in the way scholarly people pay attention. To a certain extend this shift in perspective has affected most people on the street, but not nearly so much as those paying attention at a more theoretical level. In my view, this shift has insufficiently affected theological discourse. For example, some still write about the power of the Eucharist from the angle of Thomistic metaphysics—and despite their disavowal of doing so. Hidden in their "historical method" are unquestioned assumptions that deflect deeply theological questions about what is actually going on in this ritual and its effects in this group of persons here and now. 

Phenomenological considerations raised by Husserl and then theologically incorporated into theology by Lonergan and in different helpful ways by such as Louis Dupre and Charles Taylor. The shift I see is a shift to the particulars of the specific: an effort to discern the concrete conditions of life and religiousness. Some writers who have helped me understand what I am calling this shift to the specific are: Lonergan, the Jesuit scholar Michael Buckley; Edith Wyschogrod, the Jewish philosopher of religion; Edward Farley, the pastoral theologian, now retired from Vanderbilt University, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In art a powerful example of this shift is the paintings and drawings of the Philadelphia artist, Thomas Eakins and of the Roman Catholic artist, Andy Warhol. 

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M. Blondel and Religious Experience: A Pre-cursor to Post-Modernity

Throughout his philosophical career, M Blondel critiqued the two extremes of rationalism and fideism. Likewise, he struggled to critically ground claims made about the holy or divine through utilizing a "method of immanence". These two impulses place him squarely on the topic of religious experience. On the one hand, what is experience and how is it to be conceived of i.e., the epistemological question; On the other hand, what might the meaning of a "religious" claim be? This paper will present Blondel’s contribution to the discussion about religious experience with an attention to those elements of his work which appear to already be precursors to Post-modernity.

Part One will present Le Proces de l’Intellegence wherein Blondel presents his epistemological convictions over against those prevalent in both critical thinkers and popular culture. Part Two will present his critical evaluation of mysticism found in Qu’est-ce que la mystique. In many ways, mysticism is the "test case" for religious experience. Blondel knew this and expressed it in his proposal that all Christians have a vocation to mysticism ( properly understood). In an Important way, Blondel already included extra Christian mysticism and extra-religious mysticism in his investigations.

+Part three will present the main positive contributions which emerge from Blondel’s work as well as the limits of his enterprise.

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Religion vs. Revelation? A deceptive alternative in 20th century theology

Karl Barth, whose theology has arguably cast the longest shadow on 20^th century theology, insisted that theology’s subject was revelation, the word of God – and nothing else. This position was meant to contradict, among others, the view that one important theme of theology was religion. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the alternative of a theology focussed on the notion of revelation and one focussed on religion has become a hallmark of Barthian theologies to this date. More remarkable, perhaps, is the observation that the same alternative is, in many cases, accepted by their opponents also (their claim of course being to offer a theology without reference to revelation).

This paper has two intentions. It shall argue, first, that such an alternative is misleading. It will seek to demonstrate that the two concepts of religion and of revelation are in fact complementary elements needed in every theology that wishes to account for the reality of religious experience.

It will argue, secondly, that this ‘complimentary theory’ was largely accepted in 19^th century theology. It shall show this to be the case in the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl. On the basis of this evidence, an alternative reading of Barth’s own theory is then suggested, treating his juxtaposition of religion and revelation as an extreme form of the ‘complimentary theory’ in which the two notions form an antagonistic pair.

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