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Book Cover
E-book
Author Taves, Ann, 1952- author.

Title Fits, trances, & visions : experiencing religion and explaining experience from Wesley to James / Ann Taves
Published Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [1999]
©1999

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 449 pages) : illustrations
Contents Part One. Formalism, Enthusiasm, and True Religion, 1740-1820. -- Explaining enthusiasm -- Making experience -- Shouting Methodists -- Part Two. Popular Psychology and Popular Peligion, 1820-1890. -- Clairvoyants and visionaries -- Embodying spirits -- Explaining trance -- Part Three. Religion and the Subconscious, 1886-1910. -- The psychology of religion -- Varieties of Protestant religious experience -- Conclusion
Summary "Fits, trances, visions, speaking in tongues, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, possession. Believers have long viewed these and similar involuntary experiences as religious -- as manifestations of God, the spirits, or the Christ within. Skeptics, on the other hand, have understood them as symptoms of physical disease, mental disorder, group dynamics, or other natural causes. In this sweeping work of religious and psychological history, Ann Taves explores the myriad ways in which believers and detractors interpreted these complex experiences in Anglo-American culture between the mid-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Taves divides the book into three sections. In the first, ranging from 1740 to 1820, she examines the debate over trances, visions, and other involuntary experiences against the politically charged backdrop of Anglo-American evangelicalism, established churches, Enlightenment thought, and a legacy of religious warfare. In the second part, covering 1820 to 1890, she highlights the interplay between popular psychology--particularly the ideas of "animal magnetism" and mesmerism--and movements in popular religion: the disestablishment of churches, the decline of Calvinist orthodoxy, the expansion of Methodism, and the birth of new religious movements. In the third section, Taves traces the emergence of professional psychology between 1890 and 1910 and explores the implications of new ideas about the subconscious mind, hypnosis, hysteria, and dissociation for the understanding of religious experience. Throughout, Taves follows evolving debates about whether fits, trances, and visions are natural (and therefore not religious) or supernatural (and therefore religious). She pays particular attention to a third interpretation, proposed by such "mediators" as William James, according to which these experiences are natural and religious. Taves shows that ordinary people as well as educated elites debated the meaning of these experiences and reveals the importance of interactions between popular and elite culture in accounting for how people experienced religion and explained experience."--Back cover
Analysis Buddha
Emmanuel Movement
Magnet, The (Sunderland)
New Thought
Presbyterians, Scottish
Puritanism
Quakers
Theosophy
adepts, theosophical
agency, human
catalepsy
clairvoyance
consciousness
delusions, religious
enthusiasm
fluids: magnetic
hell
imagination
inspiration
mental weakness
nervous instability
out-of-body experience
psychical research
race: and congregational makeup
shamanism
shekinah
temple: as biblical type
voices
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and indexes
Notes In English
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Mai 2020)
Subject Experience (Religion) -- History -- 18th century
Experience (Religion) -- History -- 19th century
Methodism -- History -- 18th century
Methodism -- History -- 19th century
Psychology, Religious -- History -- 18th century
Psychology, Religious -- History -- 19th century
RELIGION / History.
Experience (Religion)
Methodism
Psychology, Religious
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 99029754
ISBN 9780691212722
0691212724
Other Titles Fits, trances, and visions