Lecture 4: Religion as Intimacy

This last lecture will attempt to draw together the themes and to develop the importance of human person in any account of religion. The lecture will present the argument of Claude Romano that phenomenology can allow us access to pre-linguistic experience, developing this idea for understanding religion and supporting a human centred approach, again with support from the harder sciences about human inter-faciality. This in turn leads to a reflection on the nature of religion in terms of intimacy, as a third space between the third person account of religion as system and the first person account of religion in terms of verticality or a distinctive kind of experience. Viewing religion in this way is simultaneously to develop a phenomenology of religion that places the human in the centre of inquiry, supported by the other sciences, and sets the scene for future inquiry into religion as it develops through what Helga Nowotny calls ‘the molecular age.’