We took a breather from James' Varieties today to consider the proposed update in David B. Yaden and Andrew Newberg's Varieties of Spiritual Experience: 21st Century Research and Perspectives. Professing to revive and renew James' "phenomenologically sensitive," "philosophically sensible" and "scientifically oriented" approach to the psychology of religion (8-9), Yaden and Newberg synthesize a century's worth of work and report the results of their own psychometric work building on it.
Our class moved toward trying their survey ourselves, but started with some of the research James' book worked from, findings assembled by James' student Edwin Starbuck for his Psychology of Religion. People love writing about themselves, especially when told they need not share what they wrote, so we first spent time answering a subset of six of Starbuck's questions which appears in Varieties (above). I thought the questions pretty 19th century but the students were game. Later learning about the broader set of "autobiographical" questions Starbucks' questionnaires inquired about, they were even more intrigued. If 19th century, this was the formula for a novel - about you!
A few students recalled having seen the set of six questions in James Varieties itself but none remembered that it was in a place where James quotes a robustly "healthy-minded" person cheerily responding "nothing," "no," "none" to most of them!
A good moment to reinforce the provocation of James' counting such a view as "religious." We realized how Starbuck and James had managed, despite the Christian language shaping of their work, to offer questions open and open-ended enough to allow for a wide variety of experiences to reveal themselves in response.
It was time for the online survey, called Varieties Corpus. Everyone enjoys an online poll but this one (which takes about thirty minutes) rankled, if perhaps in fruitful ways. It opens by asking participants to describe a powerful experience in their own words ("phenomenologically sensitive") but then asks participants a barrage of questions about that experience in terms gleaned from past iterations of their survey, and over and over again in different positive and negative formulations.
It was hard not to feel badgered. Really, like any such device, it's wittingly or unwittingly an education in the terms the researchers think important. Yaden and Newberg claim to have discovered six different varieties of spiritual experience: unity, divinity [or numinous], revelatory, synchronicity, paranormal and aesthetic. But maybe these are terms worth adding to our autobiographies? Near the end the survey asks participants are asked to count the number of times they've had each.
Quantitative research, even "phenomenologically sensitive," ick! It all left us ready to return to James's 19th century characters - we left his "sick souls" twisting in the wind this week, though we know we'll find "conversion" rescuing many of them next week - but alert in a new way to the stakes of this line of inquiry. The "science of religions" language is James'. Science of what, for what?
Punting on the religious questions (is any of it, well, real?) in their "philosophically sensible" agnosticism, Yaden and Newberg are interested in the therapeutic applications of their findings - as part of "positive psychology." James' concerns seem to have been more personally existential, but also more curious about what "religious" experiences reveal about the often painfully pluralistic universe of which we're a part.
