A practice of wonderment: Rethinking religious experience through Emerson, James and Santayana.

摘要

Emerson, William James, and George Santayana each investigated rare experiences at the limits of human knowledge, and their inquiries into these states of consciousness help to blur our lines of distinction between religious and secular practice. In chapters devoted to each of them I develop a notion of 'wonderment' that attempts to articulate what is significant and distinct about these quasi-religious experiences. I locate wonderment as the position from which inquiry begins, but also as a space of indeterminacy, from which the viewer may come to experience an indefinite number of possible investigative horizons.;I then consider theists and non-theists as political groups embattled in debates that privilege a language of certainty. I propose that both theists and non-theists may find common ground, and further each of their political interests by identifying a language and practice of wonderment already at the basis of both religious and secular life.;I argue that non-theists, by adopting a language that communicates an undetermined but devoted relationship to the mysterious aspects of existence, may better represent themselves as a group faithful to a particular practice, not entirely dissimilar to a variety of common religious practices. In this way non-theists may gain recognition not as outsiders, but as members within a broader religious plurality.;Theists, for their part, by beginning to see wonderment as a practice not anathema to, but in some way constitutive of religious practice, may gain a fuller relationship to the more fluid and evolving aspects of religious devotion. The hope is that both theists and non-theists may better establish relationships to uncertainty by coming to recognize the ways in which practices of wonderment already exist within a variety of religious and secular traditions.