Religious Emotions Some Philosophical Explorations

In recent decades contemporary Anglo-American philosophy has seen a boom in publications on the subject of ‘the emotions’. Most publications focus on the cognitive value of emotions and on their moral significance. The role which emotions play in religion, however, has sofar received little attention. In this volume a number of scholars present their research on ‘religious emotions’. Is there a category of ‘religious emotions’? What is so distinctive about them? Was there really a Christian-inspired repression of the emotions? Or did Christianity also made use of the human emotional potential? How is the relation between religion and emotions conditioned by the process of secularisation? How and why did a shift from the concept of ‘passion’ to that of ‘emotion’ occur from the eighteenth century on? This collection includes systematical treatments as well as historical approaches of these issues. The last part gives some paradigmatical cases of religious emotions, like emptiness and oceanic feeling. In the study of what constitutes a human being neither religion nor emotion can be neglected. The reader is invited to reflect on their interaction.