Overview

"Is it reasonable to live a religiously oriented life, or is such a life the height of irrationality? Has neuroscience shown that religious experiences are akin to delusions, or might neuroscience actually support the validity of such experiences? In Living Religion James W. Jones offers a new approach to understanding religion after the Decade of the Brain. The modern tendency to separate theory from practice gives rise to a number of dilemmas for those who think seriously about religion. Claims about God, the world, and the nature and destiny of the human spirit have been ripped from their context in religious practice and treated as doctrinal abstractions to be justified or refuted in isolation from the living religious life that is their natural home. Jones argues that trends in contemporary psychology, especially an emphasis on embodiment and relationality, can help the thoughtful religious person return theory to practice, thereby opening up new avenues of religious knowing and new ways of supporting the commitment to a religiously lived life. This embodied-relational model offers new ways of understanding our capacity to transform and transcend our ordinary awareness and shows that it can be meaningful and reasonable to speak of a ""spiritual sense.""The brain's complexity, integration, and openness, and the many ways embodiment influences our understanding of ourselves and the world, all significantly impact our thinking about religious understanding. When linked to contemporary neuroscientific theories, the long-standing tradition of a spiritual sense is brought up to date and deployed in support of the argument of this book that reason is on the side of those who choose a religiously lived life."

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9780190927387

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"""Building on his earlier work on science and spirituality, Jones here makes a passionate case for an innate spiritual sense that brings 'an awareness of an external, divine, and transcendental reality.' Blending recent research on embodied mind with the ancient concept of a mind-suffused body, he explores the ways religious practices can help to make human existence 'transparent' to the divine existence."" --Philip Clayton, author of The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith ""In Living Religion, James Jones has once again offered us an interdisciplinary inquiry that is richly informative, arguing clearly and convincingly that psychology of religion should make religious practices the central subject of study, rather than beliefs or theological propositions taken apart from context and community. With a new emphasis on 'embodied cognition', Jones draws multiple strands of religious studies, philosophy, and psychology into fruitful dialogue, resulting not only in an impressively detailed argument, but a methodology too rarely seen and much to be emulated."" --Pamela Cooper-White, Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion, Union Theological Seminary"

In Living Religion, James Jones has once again offered us an interdisciplinary inquiry that is richly informative, arguing clearly and convincingly that psychology of religion should make religious practices the central subject of study, rather than beliefs or theological propositions taken apart from context and community. With a new emphasis on 'embodied cognition', Jones draws multiple strands of religious studies, philosophy, and psychology into fruitful dialogue, resulting not only in an impressively detailed argument, but a methodology too rarely seen and much to be emulated. * Pamela Cooper-White, Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion, Union Theological Seminary * Building on his earlier work on science and spirituality, Jones here makes a passionate case for an innate spiritual sense that brings 'an awareness of an external, divine, and transcendental reality.' Blending recent research on embodied mind with the ancient concept of a mind-suffused body, he explores the ways religious practices can help to make human existence 'transparent' to the divine existence. * Philip Clayton, author of The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith *

Author Information

James W. Jones is Distinguished Professor of the Psychology of Religion, Emeritus, at Rutgers University. He is the author of fifteen books and numerous professional papers, and the editor of several volumes of collected papers dealing with religion, psychology, and science. He serves on the editorial boards of several publications. He is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church USA and has maintained a private practice of clinical psychology, specializing in psychophysiology and behavioral medicine.

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