Religious Experience

Can an experience count as religious without being shaped by the ideas, convictions, and forms of speech that surround it? Wayne Proudfoot takes up how we might recognize, portray, examine, and account for religious experience, and asks why such experience should carry any authority. He also considers the circumstances in which someone would label their own experience as religious.

Proudfoot argues that the criteria we use to make that label already assume concepts, beliefs, and language. Some features of the experience can be traced to the conditions under which it occurs, including the person's assumptions about what causes it.