SSNB Lecture: Voices and Other Guiding Presences in the Emergence of...

SSNB Lecture Series

Voices and Other Guiding Presences in the Emergence of Four Religious and Nonreligious Social Movements

Ann Taves (Professor of Religious Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara)

This lecture examines the role of voices and other guiding presences in the emergence of Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous, A Course in Miracles study groups, and the Voice Hearing Movement. The talk will address the methodological issues involved in setting up the comparison, the importance of and challenges inherent in analyzing unusual experiences from the subjects' (emic) point of view, and how we might account for these presences and their different roles in naturalistic terms.

The lecture will be followed by a response from Miguel Farias, expanding on the implications of this work for new research into nonreligion and nonreligious belief.

Ann Taves is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her recent books include Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton, 2009) and What Matters: Ethnographies of Value in the (Not So) Secular Age, co-edited with Courtney Bender (Columbia, 2012).

Miguel Farias leads the Brain, Belief and Behaviour group at Coventry University.

Coffee will be served from 3 pm, with the lecture and Q&A starting at 3.30 pm.