Religious Experiences

Understanding religious experiences is central for understanding a wide variety of contemporary religious movements. This chapter examines the range of religious experiences reported by members of the Order of Christ Sophia. Members of the order conceive of themselves as Christian mystics, a self-identification that emphasizes this dimension of the religious life. Religious experience has also been a foundational category of analysis for certain classical theorists of religious studies. Because this approach has been rejected by a number of important recent theorists, the chapter offers an argument for taking religious experiences seriously, without burdening this category of human experience with the responsibility for legitimating the larger enterprise of religious studies.