Abstract

In his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James remarked that, as a tradition, religion is always rooted in an original religious experience of an inspirational figure.1 Using the words of the French theologian Sabatier, James describes this as “an intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent.”2 James pioneered the description of religious experience in ways that revealed more than traditional metaphysics and dogmatic theology did. His research into psychic phenomena led, for example, to “the subliminal” and “a wider consciousness,” expressions that..