Robert C. Fuller

Religion and wine : a cultural history of wine drinking in the United States

Wine, more than any other food or beverage, is intimately associated with religious experience and celebratory rituals. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in American cultural history. From the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock to the Franciscans and Jesuits who pioneered Californias Mission Trail, many American religious groups have required wine to perform their sacraments and enliven their evening meals. This book tells the story of how viniculture in America was started and sustained by a broad spectrum of religious denominations. In the process, it offers new insights into the special relationship between wine production and consumption and the spiritual dimension of human experience.

Synchronicity : C.G. Jung, psychoanalysis, and religion

Preface Jungian Synchronicity: Questions, Issues, Alternatives The Psychoanalytic Matrix of Synchronistic Events Unpacking the Jungian Projections: A New Psychoanalytic Account of Synchronicity Epilogue: A Discussion of Synchronicity and Related Matters Bibliography Index

Trait Narcissism and Contemporary Religious Trends

In a large sample of adult Americans, we examined trait narcissism among those who identify as nonreligious, traditionally religious, or “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). Our study reveals that: 1) those who identify as traditionally religious and those who identify as SBNR exhibit fairly similar levels of narcissism; 2) contrary to conventional wisdom, nonreligious Americans are lower in narcissism than religious/spiritual Americans (with nonreligious individuals particularly lower in the NPI subscales of self-absorption/self-admiration); and 3) higher levels of church attendance are not associated with lower NPI scores, though higher levels of church attendance are associated with higher NPI scores in SBNR individuals.

Body Posture and Religious Attitudes

One hundred and twenty-seven college students were recruited for an experimental investigation of the effect of body posture on religious attitudes. Roughly half of the participants were placed in lower, contractive body postures while the other half were placed in higher, expansive body postures. After five minutes in these postures, all were asked to fill out a measure of religious attitudes. As expected, participants in the lower, contractive positions expressed more agreement with conventional religious beliefs than those in the higher, expansive positions.

Religion is nonsense

ly and hypothetically conferred tremendous adaptive advantages. The DMN allows us to recall past experiences, imagine alternative behavioral strategies, and compare potential outcomes. In our normal waking state, the DMN simulates past and future experiences, pointing us toward behavioral strategies that are most likely to meet our needs and interests. Occasionally, however, such as happens while we dream or are in an altered state of consciousness, such default cognitive processing conjures up vivid imagery unchecked by “reality monitoring.” That is, under some circumstances the brain’s own internal, automatic mechanisms for simulating reality become hyperactive even without new input from our physical senses and without the conscious mind being aware that these vivid scenarios are hypothetical rather than actual. In these instances, the mind is flooded with rich, emotionally salient images that are literally nonsense (i.e., arising from the mind’s own processing mechanisms without sensory input). Taves explains how some individuals experience sudden eruptions from our “default mode network” by comparing them and their experiences to what we know about highly hypnotizable subjects. Research on highly hypnotizable subjects shows that some individuals are unusually adept at shifting attention in ways that afford them ready access to the brain’s internal processing mechanisms such as the DMN. For this reason, they become increasingly capable of “receiving” rich simulations of hypothetical scenarios that strike them as exceptionally real even though this imagery does not originate in the physical world surrounding them. These peculiar states reveal a vast mental network removed from the world of shared, public experience. These peculiar states, in other words, are vivid and emotionally charged displays of imagery generated by cognitive mechanisms far removed from our everyday waking reality. Revelatory Events is without parallel in its careful historical reconstruction of the process whereby peculiar experiences occurring to Joseph Smith, Bill Wilson, and Helen Schucman came to be interpreted as knowledge emanating from divine sources. Taves succeeds admirably in elucidating why some individuals suddenly have vivid experiences of a nonsensory “presence.”What she does less successfully is draw on the vast findings of cognitive science that explain why the brain’s “default”mechanisms imbue experience with patently religious qualities. Nowhere does she pull upon the highly relevant research of Pascal Boyer (2001), Jonathan Haidt (2012), Steven Pinker (1999), Scott Atran (2002), Justin Barrett (2007), Ara Norenzayan (2013), or the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1999). She mentions Tooby and Cosmides (2005) only in passing. All of these researchers have contributed to our understanding of the evolutionarily older cognitive mechanisms that structure and guide human cognition automatically, spontaneously, and without conscious awareness. All of these researchers, furthermore, have contributed to our understanding of how these ordinarily unconscious cognitive mechanisms predispose the human brain to religious (i.e., highly dualistic, anthropocentric, assuming that the mind controls events in the physical universe, rich in fantasy, a proclivity for discerning human-like causality and intentionality even when they are not present, etc.) rather than scientific conceptions of the world. All of the empirically grounded information generated by these scholars would have enriched Taves’ explanation of why the human brain, when attention shifts away from “reality monitoring” and sensory-connected processes, suddenly reveals rich imagery generated by its own innate processing mechanisms that quite naturally strike us as religiously salient. Cognitive science provides us with empirically grounded information about the brain’s innate tendencies to imbue experience with supernatural qualities. Taves’ decision to confine her “interests in cognitive science” to Gerrans’ somewhat speculative writings weakens her ability to showcase how twenty-first-century scholars might go about explicating religion in a fully naturalist context. RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR 297

Grandiose Narcissism and Religiosity

This chapter reviews the modest literature on the relationship between grandiose narcissism and various aspects of religiosity. Current evidence suggests that grandiose narcissists tend to be less humble, less forgiving, less apologetic, and less empathetic but report similar levels of religiosity, including frequency of church attendance and prayer, as non-narcissists (contrary to conventional wisdom that religiosity should inhibit narcissism). Grandiose narcissism is associated with extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivation toward religion, with more conflict and anger in one’s spiritual life, and with more self-serving spiritual beliefs. Moreover, compared to those low in grandiose narcissism, they are less moved by their own wrongdoing to seek God and may not be as positively affected by certain spiritual practices (e.g., meditation). We suggest future directions for research and conclude that future research will benefit from examining different forms of narcissism, as well as the individual facets that underlying this multidimensional personality trait.

When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought . By Terryl Givens. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. x + 388 pp.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Virtually all adherents of Western religions believe in post-mortal existence. Yet relatively few believe in pre-mortal existence despite the fact that this theological notion has surfaced repeatedly over the last three thousand years of Western philosophical and theological thought. Terryl Givens offers a brilliant intellectual history of this enduring notion that humanitys spiritual identity can be traced to a state or place that preexists mortal life. From Mesopotamian mythology and Plato to the Latter-day Saints and Carl Jung, belief in pre-mortal existence has fueled spiritualities that celebrate our inherent potential to envision and strive toward the sublime.The intellectual power of this volume derives in part from its vast historical expanse. Givens chronicles varying interpretations of preexistence across some thirty centuries and countless European and American social settings. He does so by offering concise, masterful summaries of the many intellectual figures who have championed the belief that humanity belongs to a higher spiritual order. Versions of this notion are scattered throughout ancient Near Eastern religious traditions as well as the philosophical systems traceable to Pythagoras and Orpheus. It is, however, in Plato that we find the most eloquent explanation of how humanitys preexistence in a transcendent order sheds light on otherwise perplexing philosophical problems. In Platos works the preexistence of the soul explains our cognitive capacity to apprehend universals, our ability to make moral judgments, our capacity for language, our spiritual yearnings, and our participation in a world that is fundamentally just despite observed imbalances between merit and circumstance. The unequaled respect accorded to Plato by both the early church and subsequent philosophers ensured some measure of ongoing legitimacy to this philosophical doctrine even when it eventually fell outside Christian theological orthodoxy.Subsequent advocates of pre-mortal existence include Plotinus, Origen, Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More, Romantic poets ranging from Blake to Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Beecher, Joseph Smith, sundry New Age advocates, and those contemporary theologians trying to recapture a Logos theology that has largely been dormant in Christian thought since Origen. A common theme in their advocacy of preexistence is faith in humanitys potential for creatively transcending all environmental conditions. The fact that we fundamentally belong to a higher order of things explains the better angels of our nature. Spiritual preexistence accounts for why we intuitively know things not gained through the senses: why we yearn for transcendence and the sublime, why we share a common moral sense, why we find an instant affinity with certain individuals, and why pain and misfortune are unevenly distributed in Gods fundamentally just universe. …

24.95 paper.

The writings of the late Erik H. Erikson (1) have contributed directly to the psychological study of religion, (2) were amenable to the efforts of others to develop normative theological arguments, and (3) might be seen as themselves examples of contemporary, nontheological accounts of the religious dimension of human existence. This paper begins by reviewing the principal contributions that Erikson made to the psychological study of religion, followed by a review of the uses that have been made of Eriksons work for normative/constructive activities in such areas as practical theology and pastoral counseling. I will then argue that Eriksons writings — when viewed in the vein of William Jamess radical empiricism and functionalist accounts of human religiosity — identify an irreducibly religious dimension to normative human functioning. Eriksons functionalism constitutes a form of nontheological religious thinking that speaks directly to concerns presenting themselves in contemporary culture.