Drawing from a range of examples, this seminar will present a thesis about the ways in which the goal of meditation within specific spiritual traditions affects practice. It will raise questions about the nature of meditation and other spiritual practices and about individual and communal experience. Christopher Wood is a DPhil student in the Theology Faculty. His background is in Theology (Birmingham) and he has research interests in the history of ideas, comparative religion, and the interface between Theology and Psychology.
Lectures on Religious experience
The teleology of meditation
Graduate seminar
Christopher Wood
23 Nov 2006
Related: Religious experience
Religious experience in psychology, anthropology and sociology Lecture 1: Anthropology of religion and the religious imagination
Dr Jessica Frazier
13 Feb 2009
Many of the canonical names in anthropology have been criticised for their literary style and their tendency towards evocative narrative. Here we argue that this is not a methodological weakness, but the autonomous development of a conception of understanding in terms of imaginative empathy and inter-subjectivity, which parallels hermeneutic philosophy. Religious experiences are literally recreated in the reader, forming an intimate bond between the scholar and his or her subject.
Related: Religious experience, Religious Studies
Religious experience in psychology, anthropology and sociology Lecture 2: Psychology of religion and the cartography of belief
Dr Jessica Frazier
27 Feb 2009
Psychologists of religion from Jung to Freud, and Boyer and Laing, have produced speculative models of religious subjectivity, according to which the human mind appears variously as an ocean of symbols, a volcanic core wracked by powerful forces, a computational machine, or a shell through transcendence may occasionally break. Just as science posits its own models, so psychologists of religion use metaphors of spatial relations and fluid dynamics to provide a mapping of the self. We examine this mechanistic model, and also look at the way in which thinkers such as Jung and Boyer incorporate un-mappable territories as a crucial concession to the claims of religion itself.
Related: Religious experience, Religious Studies
Religious experience in psychology, anthropology and sociology Lecture 3: Sociology of religion and the force of the individual
Dr Jessica Frazier
6 Mar 2009
The necessity of analysing religious influences on society has meant that key sociologists from Marx to Durkheim and Weber insisted on the significance of mood, motivation, and individual agency as the heart of any idea of society change. Religious feeling is thus one of the cornerstones enabling their theorisation of social dynamics. Here we look at sociological models for studying subjectivity as an autonomous ‘centre’ of dynamism and force, the beating heart of grand-scale movements of history.
Related: Religious experience, Religious Studies