Ann Taves

• Ph.D.
• Research Professor and Distinguished Professor (Emerita) at University of California, Santa Barbara

Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left us with little understanding of the mechanisms, whether biological, psychological, and/or sociocultural, through...

Religious experience played a prominent role in the psychological study of religion in the early decades of the twentieth-century, then waned as behaviorist and quantitative approaches became more prominent, and reemerged in the second half of the twentieth century alongside, and largely distinct from, mystical experience and, more recently, spirit...

Pretesting survey items for interpretability and relevance is a commonly recommended practice in the social sciences. The goal is to construct items that are understood as intended by the population of interest and test if participants use the expected cognitive processes when responding to a survey item. Such evidence forms the basis for a critica...

Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and the likelihood that a given experience will be reported. Experiences that involve claims regarding deities, extr...

When we survey the current theoretical landscape, we find two distinct approaches to the analysis of worldviews. The systemic approach centers on responses to fundamental worldview questions (aka “big questions”); the cognitive‐behavioral approach focuses on the processes that give rise to behaviors that express worldviews. If we think of worldview...

The building block approach (BBA) is a metatheoretical framework for studying the complex relationship between human psychology and cognition on the one hand, and socio-cultural formations and practices on the other. As such the BBA belongs to the wider project of consilience between the sciences and the humanities. The aim is to provide a common l...

This is a major, much needed intervention in the study of religious experiences and madness. Richard Saville-Smith here offers a brilliant critique of the works of major twentieth-century theorists—most of whom went to great lengths to distance religious and psychopathological experiences—and a fascinating new approach to visions, voices, and posse...

Do original What is Nonreligion? On the Virtues of a Meaning Systems Framework for Studying Nonreligious and Religious Worldviews in the Context of Everyday Life. Secularism and Nonreligion, v. 7, n. 9, pp.1-6, 2018. O tradutor agradece pela gentil autorização dada pela autora e pelos editores do periódico Secularism & Non-Religion

Throughout history, people have reported nonordinary experiences (NOEs) such as feelings of oneness with the universe and hearing voices. Although these experiences form the basis of several spiritual and religious traditions, experiencing NOEs may create stress and uncertainty among those who experience such events. To provide a more systematic ov...

Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and the likelihood that a given experience will be reported. Experiences that involve claims regarding deities, extr...

The processes of believing integrate external perceptual information from the environment with internal emotional states and prior experience to generate probabilistic neural representations of events, i.e., beliefs. As these neural representations manifest mostly below the level of a person’s conscious awareness, they may inadvertently affect the...

This outstanding textbook provides an expansive overview of the sub-field of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). White’s summary of the field’s core assumptions affords the opportunity – as does the book as a whole – to reflect on theory and method in the CSR and its implications for the evolutionary study of religion and/or culture more gener...

At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits based on alterations they observed in their sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this comparative approach to such "nonordinary experiences" (NOEs) was never fully realize...

The Values in Scholarship on Religion ( VISOR ) project collected data on the preferred methods and values of scholars in the academic study of religion. This dataset supports comparisons between members of the American Academy of Religion ( AAR ) and partner organizations, such as the North American Association for the Study of Religion ( NAASR ),...

Cross-cultural similarities and differences in “nonordinary” experiences—experiences that stand out to people relative to what they consider ordinary or everyday—are not well understood by clinicians or researchers. Although such experiences—many of which are interpreted as religious, spiritual, extraordinary, or psychopathological—can give rise to...

At the turn of the 20th century, researchers compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits. In doing so, researchers recognized the phenomenological overlap between the experiences reported by their subjects: alterations in the sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this compara...

In the social sciences, validity refers to the adequacy of a survey (or other mode of assessment) for its intended purpose. Validation refers to the activities undertaken during and after the construction of the survey to evaluate and improve validity. Item validation refers here to procedures for evaluating and improving respondents’ understanding...

This article presents selected findings of the Values in Scholarship on Religion (VISOR) project. Conversations about the values and norms that ought to shape the academic study of religion are quite common but typically based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience. The goal of VISOR was to gather data that could ground debates about the val...

When operationalizing ‘religiosity’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious experience’ as measurable constructs, researchers tacitly treat them as if they were cross-culturally stable ‘things’ rather than investigating the way culturally-laden concepts, such as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual,’ are used to interpret or appraise contested aspects of human life w...

Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left us with little understanding of mechanisms, whether biological, psychological and/or socio-cultural, through whic...

This essay uses the ‘big questions’ embedded in ways of life and implicitly answered in goal directed action to address the future of the study of religion. It locates Religious Studies as a subset of Worldview Studies, defined in terms of big questions, in order to offer an evenhanded basis for comparing religious and nonreligious worldviews. Defi...

My introduction to modeling has gone through various stages. The first stage, in which I worked with the modeling team, was like an initiation process in which, as the initiate, I trusted my guides without really knowing where we were going or what the outcome would be. During this stage, I worked with the modeling team and a class of ten students...

Religious experience played a prominent role in the psychological study of religion in the early decades of the twentieth-century, then waned as behaviorist and quantitative approaches became more prominent, and reemerged in the second half of the twentieth century alongside, and largely distinct from, mystical experience and, more recently, spirit...

Seguindo o que foi retratado no livro de Asprem nos termos da Problemgeschichte, podemos nos perguntar o que significa “problema”. Problemas, como ele os usa, são baseados em experiências humanas, o que significa que para problemas serem problemas as pessoas precisam percebê-los como tal. O problema do desencanto, portanto, implica em (1) a percepç...

In the social sciences, validity refers to the adequacy of a survey (or other mode of assessment) for its intended purpose. Validation refers to the activities undertaken during and after the construction of the survey to evaluate and improve validity. Item validation refers here to procedures for evaluating and improving respondents’ understanding...

Discussions of nonreligion or secularity face a central challenge that has long plagued scholars of religion – that of specifying an object of study. Although several suggestions have been made, I think we can most effectively capture the range of things we want to study by (1) adopting worldviews, defined in terms of “big questions,” as an overarc...

To get beyond the solely negative identities signaled by atheism and agnosticism, we have to conceptualize an object of study that includes religions and nonreligions. We advocate a shift from “religions” to “worldviews” and define worldviews in terms of the human ability to ask and reflect on “big questions” (BQs; e.g., what exists? how should we...

To get beyond the solely negative identities signaled by atheism and agnosticism, we have to conceptualize an object of study that includes religions and non-religions. We advocate a shift from “religions” to “worldviews” and define worldviews in terms of the human ability to ask and reflect on “big questions” ([BQs], e.g., what exists? how should...

Unseen presences. Apparitions. Hearing voices. Although some people would find such experiences to be distressing and seek clinical help, others perceive them as transformative. Occasionally, these unusual phenomena give rise to new spiritual paths or religious movements. This book provides fresh insights into what is perhaps the bedrock of all rel...

Unseen presences. Apparitions. Hearing voices. Although some people would find such experiences to be distressing and seek clinical help, others perceive them as transformative. Occasionally, these unusual phenomena give rise to new spiritual paths or religious movements. Revelatory Events provides fresh insights into what is perhaps the bedrock of...

We argue that event is a basic concept that humanists, social scientists, and cognitive psychologists can use to build a consilient research platform for the study of experiences that people deem religious. Grounding the study of experience in event cognition allows us to reframe several classic problems in the study of “religious experience”: (1)...

In light of the framing of Asprem’s book in terms of Problemgeschichte, we can ask what is meant by a “problem.” Problems, as he uses it, are grounded in human experience, which means that for problems to be problems people have to perceive them as such. The problem of disenchantment thus entails both (1) the perception of the problem and (2) vario...

Luther H. Martin and Jesper Sorensen (eds.) Past Minds: Studies in Cognitive Historiography (Religion, Cognition, and Culture). London: Equinox, 2011. xiii + 206 pp. ISBN 9781845537418 (pbk.) This is the second volume in the Religion, Cognition, and Culture series edited by Jeppe Sinding Jensen and Armin W. Geertz. As noted in the preface, this vol...

Researchers have not yet done an adequate job of reverse engineering the complex cultural concepts of religion and spirituality in a way that allows scientists to operationalize component parts and historians of religion to consider how the component parts have been synthesized into larger socio-cultural wholes. Doing so involves two steps: (1) dis...

Norenzayan's effort to integrate genetic and cultural evolution is a welcome advance over previous efforts, as is the attention he devotes to different levels of analysis from cognitive mechanisms to large group interactions. The scope of Norenzayan's argument, however, is bound to leave many scholars of religion feeling uneasy. The content of his...

In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and...

The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America. By Robert C. Fuller. University of Chicago Press, 2013. xiv + 231 pages. $35.00. Robert Fuller’s The Body of Faith is a wonderfully ambitious and wide-ranging effort designed to bring the biological body into the history of religion in America and by extension into the study of religio...

Parsing Meaning and Value in Relation to Experience Ann Taves, University of California at Santa Barbara taves@religion.ucsb.edu Drawing on Neville’s axiological metaphysics, Barrett proposes an ecological approach to the perception of religious meaning and value, such that “the experience of rich and abiding value, impervious to hardship and misfo...

Sørensen’s (2007) cognitive theory of magic offers more precise tools for analysing the cognitive dimensions of novelty and change across a range of cultural domains if we extract it from academic discussions of “religion” and “magic” and recast it generically in terms of the attribution of non-ordinary powers within temporally structured event-fra...

The Mormon claim that Joseph Smith discovered ancient golden plates buried in a hillside in upstate New York is too often viewed in simple either/or terms, such that the plates either existed, making Smith the prophet he claimed to be, or did not, making him deceptive or delusional. If we assume that there were no ancient golden plates and at the s...

Max Weber's (1978) Economy and Society embeds religion, or, more precisely, religious behaviour in a sociology of social action, grounded in the subjective meaning that actors implicitly or explicitly attach to their behaviour. Although his approach is sometimes referred to as “interpretive sociology”, Weber was equally concerned with interpretatio...

Excerpt from “Conclusion,” from Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James A professor of American religion and Catholic studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ann Taves's areas of expertise include the study of Catholicism, “tradition” as a category of analysis, and psychologic...

Given that religion, religious, and religions are Western folk concepts, that their meaning is unstable and contested, and that they cannot be defined so as to specify anything uniquely, we need to consider broader, more generic ways of characterizing the sorts of things that interest us as scholars of religion. Rather than relying on emically load...

Two basic problems that scholars of religion routinely confront— specifying an object of study and figuring out how to study it—can be construed as opportunities. Scholars of religion typically overcome the difficulties inherent in specifying their object of study by offering a stipulative definition. Doing so, however, artificially stabilizes our...

In choosing between theories of the self, McNamara selects from those that are limited to humans, rather than from multi-level conceptions that highlight that which we share with other animals. The ability of other animals to take goal-directed action without reflecting self-consciously on their choices suggests that the sense of division that inte...

Positioning Catholic Studies within religious studies highlights the question of "what is a tradition?" and simultaneously allows us to do three things: elaborate a non-essentialist second order understanding of the concept of tradition appropriate to Religious Studies, study Catholicism as a tradition that has been created and maintained through f...

There has been much debate over whether New Age spirituality (NAS) is a useful category and, if so, how best to characterize the phenomena clustered under that heading. Historically minded scholars generally agree, however, on the value of distinguishing between narrower and broader uses of the term “new age”! In the narrower sense, it refers above...

We can foster collaboration between the academic study of religion and the sciences, particularly the biological and psychological sciences, if we (1) construct a common object of study that can be positioned within an evolutionary paradigm, (2) adopt a building block approach to the study of religion that distinguishes between religions and the mo...

Religious Experience Reconsidered was premised on the idea that experience is a site of contested meaning and value for subjects (and scholars). Although the concept of specialness has drawn considerable attention, my goal in writing the book was to update efforts to use attribution theory to bridge between religious studies and the psychology of r...

White has written an exciting new book that significantly advances our understanding of the interplay between religion and psychology in the United States from 1830 to 1940. White focuses on “religious liberals,” defining the term generously to encompass liberal Protestants, post-Protestant metaphysical believers, spiritualists, theosophists, deist...

The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, psychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from...

William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of the world's most popular attempts to meld science and religion. Academic reviews of the book were mixed in Europe and America, however, and prominent contemporaries, unsure whether it was science or theology, struggled to interpret it. James's reliance on an inherently ambiguous unders...

This paper examines apparitions that morph into embodied or channeled entities through a comparison of JZ [Judy Zebra] Knight (b. 1946), who claims to channel a 35,000-year-old spirit-warrior named Ramtha, and turn-of-the-last-century case studies of spirit possession and multiple personality. Considering visions as arising, like dreams, from inter...

There is a kinship between Owen Flanagan's The Really Hard Problem and William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience that not only can help us to understand Flanagan's book but also can help scholars, particularly scholars of religion, to be attentive to an important development in the realm of the “spiritual but not religious.” Specificall...

There have been two major approaches to the study of ‘religious experience’ in religious studies, which I refer to as the sui generis model and the ascriptive model. The sui generis model assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that there are specifically religious (or mystical or spiritual) experiences, emotions, acts, or objects; the ascriptive model...

This chapter addresses the problem of teaching ritual in relation to historically anti-ritualistic traditions that developed ritual forms of their own, specifically, Protestantism in America. The chapter's author begins by describing how she would revise a course that she has frequently taught to include more discussion of the issues at stake in th...

Cognitive theories of religious experience, while helpful in explaining some aspects of spirit possession, do not provide a means of accounting for the experience of mediums whose ordinary selves are ‘absent’ during possession rituals. Using the late nineteenth-century medium, Mrs Piper, as a case study, I argue that hypnosis provides a means of in...

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 6.1 (2006) 101-106 In an essay slated for publication in a journal devoted to the study of spirituality, it seems particularly important to note that Robert Orsi does not pursue his work under that rubric. Orsi positions himself within religious studies and critiques what he views as religious studies'...

There is no way to study "religious experience" as such scientifically because what constitutes "religion" is highly contested. We are as a result restricted to studying stipulated aspects of experience, some of which may be deemed by some to be religious. These stipulated aspects of experience will naturally cut across the boundaries of discipline...

Attempts to ground the study of spirituality in definitions of spirituality suffer conceptually from difficulties that also beset the study of religion. Drawing from discussions among scholars of religion, I argue for an approach to the study of spirituality in which the need to define spirituality is not assumed, but rather chosen depending on wha...

Scholars have understood William James's unattributed reference to a discovery made in 1886, which he described as “the most important step forward in psychology since [he had] been a student of that science,” as a reference to the British psychical researcher Frederic Myers, rather than, as I argue, the French psychologist Pierre Janet....

Decadence and Catholicism. By HansonEllis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. xii + 403 pp. n.p. - Volume 67 Issue 4 - Ann Taves

L'A. etudie l'interpretation des experiences religieuses de dissociation dans la tradition methodiste. Il demontre la progressive ritualisation de ce phenomene lorsqu'on passe du renouveau methodiste anglais au Nouveau Monde, avec des situations dans lesquelles predominent les Afro-americains.

In a review published in 1849, Ephraim Peabody observed that “America has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization,—the autobiographies of escaped slaves.” As Peabody went on to point out, “these narratives show how it [slavery] looks as seen from the side of the slave. They contain the victim's account of the...

Devotion to the Holy Spirit in American Catholicism. Edited by ChinniciJoseph P., O.F.M. Sources in American Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. x + 227 pp. $12.95. - Volume 55 Issue 4 - Ann Taves