??In the summer session of 2009 I taught RELST101 in the University of Pennsylvania College of Liberal and Professional Studies. It is a 12-week course that met once a week.
Religion and Psychology (RELS 101-900) was a humanities course offered by the Department of Religious Studies at Penn. The broad content involved the rational study of religious experience; that meant that we looked at frameworks in which religious experience can be examined, outside of specific religious beliefs.
Readings included
a) Selections from William James, 19th-20th century founder of Pragmatism (a philosophy), psychology (a science), and religious studies (a discipline in the humanities
b) Selections from W. E. B. DuBois, one of James’s students, who wrote prolifically about African-American experience, often the particular experience of religion in African-American communities. Is religious experience built out of ethnic or community identity?
c) A rational guide to obtaining religious experience (replicating religious experience?) by Evelyn Underhill, noted for her historical expositions of Mysticism. Can religious experience be replicated without specific “religious” content?
d) A series of Freud’s popular lectures that present his fully formed theory of defense mechanisms — one of the vocabularies for discussing religious experience. If Freud thought the fully analyzed person would not need religion (and he did), where do we locate religious experience in his thought? As a combination of defense mechanisms? In the Id, or the Superego, isolated from the awareness of the ego?
e) Abraham Maslow’s mature thought about Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences.
f) a group of modern psychologists and cognitive scientists of the last twenty years.
In addition, to establish a common experience base for the class, we will see two very different films, listen to part of a lecture, and otherwise use media where appropriate.
Requirements:
- One-page response papers on the readings
- one long or two shorter explorations of specific rational approaches to the study of religious experience as papers.
- One take-home final that, I hope, provoked considerable thought and analysis.
- Class attendance and participation.
Updated 8/10/2010.
