Contents

Acknowledgements

Contributors

Introduction: Experience or Expression? A Puzzling Oversight

Part 1 Grasping the Ungraspable?

Chapter 1 How to do Transcendence with Words? The Problem of Articulation in Religious Experience

Chapter 2 Modern Trials and Tests of ‘Experience’: Plastic Commonplace and Managed Exception

Part 2 Imagining the Unimaginable?

Chapter 3 Fiercely Proselytizing and Feverishly Protective: Reading John’s Revelation with Jacques Derrida

Chapter 4 Religious Experience without Belief? Toward an Imaginative Account of Religious Engagement

Chapter 5 “Is that You?” Hearing God’s Voice in the Words of a Stranger (Judges 6:11–24)

Chapter 6 Living with Invisibility: Emotion, Mind, and Transcendence

Part 3 Interpreting the Uninterpretable?

Chapter 7 Navid Kermani’s Poetic Hermeneutics of Religious Experiences

Chapter 8 The Complexity of Hermeneutical Experience: Transcendence and Transformation

Chapter 9 “Mediated Immediacy”: Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx on the Non-Reflective Element of Experience

Chapter 10 Supra-Religious? The Concept of Transcendental Experience and the (In‑)Accessibility of the Absolute

Part 4 Performing the Unperformable?

Chapter 11 The Trouble with Trust in the Transcendent: Ernst Troeltsch’s Reception of William James

Chapter 12 The Corporeality of Religious Experience: Embodied Cognition in Religious Practices

Chapter 13 Religious Experience in Fourteenth-Century Mystical Writing: The Revelations of Elsbeth von Oye

Chapter 14 Speaking of God: Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Paradox of Religious Experience

Conclusion: Experience or Expression? Preserving the Puzzle

Index of Names

Index of Subjects