The Humanities Institute invites you to join us this fall for the James Barnett Lecture Series in Humanistic Anthropology, Understanding Religious Experience.
All lectures will be held at The Humanities Institute (UCHI), Austin Building, Room 301 at 4:00 pm. For more information on the series, please contact Richard Sosis (richard.sosis@uconn.edu) or visit our website at humanities.uconn.edu.
Since space is limited, to reserve a seat, please contact us at uchi.uconn.edu or call 486-9057.
October, 7, 2014
ANN TAVES (University of California, Santa Barbara)
“Events and Appraisals in the Study of (Religious) Experience”
Ann Taves is professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; past president of the American Academy of Religion and president elect of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things, winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James, winner of the 2000 Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Philosophy and Religion. She is currently working on a book entitled Revelatory Events: Unusual Experiences and New Spiritual Paths and supervising the interdisciplinary Religion, Experience, and Mind Lab Group at UCSB.
October 28, 2014
NATHANIEL BARRETT (University of Navarra)
“Engagement, Energy, and Enjoyment: Religious Experience and the Enhancement of Everyday Life”
Nathaniel Barrett is a research fellow for the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. His research focuses on non-computational theories of mind, especially ecological psychology, enactive theory, and dynamical systems theory, and on the potential contributions of these branches of psychology to our understanding of the perception of religious meaning and value. He also researches and writes about the evolution of religion, axiology (theory of value), pragmatism, process philosophy, and Chinese philosophy. His articles have been published in Process Studies, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Journal for the American Academy of Religion, Philosophy East & West, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Religion, Brain, and Behavior, Sophia, and the Routledge Companion to Religion and Science.
November 18, 2014
WESLEY WILDMAN (Boston University)
“Phenomenology of Intense Experiences”
Wesley J. Wildman is Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics at Boston University. His research and publications pursue a multidisciplinary, comparative approach to important topics within religious and theological studies. The programmatic statement of a theory of rationality underlying this type of integrative intellectual work is Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion (State University of New York Press, 2010). Science and Religious Anthropology (Ashgate, 2009) presents his multidisciplinary interpretation of the human condition, and the companion volumeScience and Ultimate Reality (Ashgate, forthcoming) articulates his account of religious naturalism in relation to competing views of ultimate reality. Religious and Spiritual Experiences (Cambridge University Press, 2011) presents a multidisciplinary interpretation of religious experience. The three co-edited volumes of Science and the World’s Religions (2013) demonstrate the ways in which all religions have something at stake in science-religion dialogue, and the two co-edited volumes of Encyclopedia of Science and Religion (2003) survey the field. He is co-founder of the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, a research institute devoted to the scientific study of religion, and founding co-editor of the institute’s Taylor & Francis journal Religion, Brain & Behavior.
For more information, contact: Richard Sosis at richard.sosis@uconn.edu