Professor emerita June McDaniel (College of Charleston) will explore Writing on Ecstasy in the Academy: Can it be done? Should it be done? An abstract follows below:
The topic of religious ecstasy has been largely suppressed in the academic study of religion, for the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. The search for ecstatic experience in modern society has migrated into such areas as war, politics, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, psychedelics, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality. The loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects. Writing in the fields of religious studies, psychology and anthropology must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences. Writers need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.
