Religious Experience: A Genealogy of the Concept and Future Prospects of its Scholarly Use

Schlieter, Jens (2023). Religious Experience: A Genealogy of the Concept and Future Prospects of its Scholarly Use. In: Freudenberg, Maren; Elwert, Frederik; Karis, Tim; Radermacher, Martin; Schlamelcher, Jens (eds.) Stepping Back and Looking Ahead: Twelve Years of Studying Religious Contact at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Bochum. Dynamics in the History of Religions: Vol. 13 (pp. 149-181). Leiden: Brill

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The contribution discusses the genealogy of the concept of "religious experience" and its transformation into a category for the systematic study of religion/s from a historical perspective. As experience is necessarily subjective, the problem arises for the experiencing individual of how to know that a certain experience is "religious" – an encounter with the "divine", or the "real". Individuals, I argue, solve the problem by referring to similar experiences that they had earlier in life. Moreover, they emphasize that the experience can be termed religious by its post-experiential transformative effects. Accordingly, a scholarly reconstruction of "religious experience" should pay attention to these autobiographical frames.

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