Passionate Belief: William James, Emotion and Religious Experience

This essay appears in the first collection of papers on Foucault and theology. The book was an attempt by Bernauer and Carrette to bring together a variety of engagements with Foucault’s thought since his death in 1984 in order to capture a watershed in the intellectual exchange. It has become a defining text in this genre. The article captures this new frontier of engagements by trying to explore the implications of Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality in terms of how his work inspired writings in gay and lesbian literature known as ‘queer theory’. The article explores the close relation between discourses of sexuality and theology and attempts to show how Foucault’s rejection of sexuality presents a challenge to monotheistic theology. The position is substantiated by excursions into Foucault’s model of the self and examinations of Buddhist traditions, which develop concepts of desire not sexuality. The article shows the importance of Foucault’s work for rethinking theology in terms of contemporary discussions of queer sexuality

William James's Hidden Religious Imagination: A Universe of Relations

This book offers a radical new reading of William James’s work on the idea of ‘religion.’ Moving beyond previous psychological and philosophical interpretations, it uncovers a dynamic, imaginative, and critical use of the category of religion. This work argues that we can only fully understand James’s work on religion by returning to the ground of his metaphysics of relations and by incorporating literary and historical themes

Rupture and Transformation: Foucault’s Concept of Spirituality Reconsidered

Using Foucault’s conceptual frame from The Archaeology of Knowledge to read Foucault’s late deployment of “spirituality,” this article argues that Foucault’s enigmatic gesture in using this concept reveals a refusal of “rupture” from the Christian pre-modern discourse of “spirit.” Despite attempts to alter the “field of use,” Foucault’s genealogical commitment ensures a Christian continuity in modern discourses of transformation. In a detailed examination of the 1982 Collège de France lectures, the article returns Foucault’s use of “spirituality” to the Alexandrian joining of philosophy and theology and the specificity of Christian practice and belief

Religion and Critical Psychology: Religious Experience in the Knowledge Economy

Jeremy Carrette argues that the psychology of religion is no longer sustainable without a social critique, and that as William James predicted, the project of the modernist psychology of religion has failed. Controversially, he champions greater social and philosophical analysis within the field to challenge the political naivety and disciplinary illusions of the traditional approaches to psychology of religion. Carrette discusses the relevance of the social and economic factors surrounding the debates of psychology and religion, through three critical examples: psychoanalysis; humanistic psychology; and, cognitive neuroscience. "A Critical Psychology of Religion" provides a new dimension to the debates surrounding religious experience. It will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of critical psychology, religious experience and the psychology of religion and extends an interdisciplinary challenge to the separation of psychology, sociology, politics, economics and religion