This stimulating collection of essays from several different fields explores the relationship between emotion and religion from ancient times until the present. Following the editor's detailed and useful history of the subject, the authors discuss the effects of contemporary psychology on the scientific study of affect and religion, analyzing societies as far flung as orthodox Judaism and Indonesia, and subjects as diverse as the history of sport and psychoanalysis. The writers emphasize the complexity of modern research, much of which focuses on the effect of body chemistry on emotion and, in turn, on the individual's receptivity to different religions. As Corrigan explains: “Whether you join the emotionally expressive Methodists singing happily about ‘Jesus coming in the air,’ or the Unitarians, whom Methodists have long criticized for being unemotional, your religious proclivities might have more to do with who your great grandparents were than whether the idea of hellfire resonates” (8).
According to Donovan O. Schaefer and echoed by other writers, philosophers “employ a binary in which religion is the zone of error, a parcel of feel-good applause lines, and science the space of austere, sovereign reason. In this story, religion feels. Science/secularism only thinks” (75). Schaefer and the writers of this volume insist that science and religion cannot be seen in terms of a simple dichotomy, but as imbricated in each other. According to Mark Wynn: “For a rounded understanding of a given spiritual religious tradition, we need to make use of two kinds of vocabulary, one metaphysical, and one emotional and experiential. . . . What is said in metaphysical terms . . . in some measure informs and constrains what can be said in emotional terms, and vice versa” (53).
Much of the discussion of these writers is immersed in the concept of affect theory, “a movement emerging out of contemporary queer theory and post-structural philosophy that emphasizes the correlations between nonlinguistic forces and power. . . . [It] calls on us to think about pages as things that chain us, that thrill us, that cut us, and make us dance” (69). Donovan Schaefer and others describe the concept of affect theory as “the move away from . . . earlier approaches which assumed that religions were simply tantamount to worldviews or bundles of beliefs—what affect therapy highlights is that neither secularisms nor religions can be flattened down to sets of neutral propositional assertions. . . . More than just ideas, they are procedures for amplifying the emotional resonance of embodied encounters with things in the world, with other bodies, and with the libraries of murmuring pages that are our worldviews, concepts, and beliefs” (88).
M. Gail Hamner employs affect theory as a tool for examining documentaries on religion: “This kind of . . . affective moment has not historically formed part of social analysis, and so it has been the purview of recent affect theory to call attention to it. . . . This essay argues that the tools of affect theory usefully demonstrate how social or group infighting are negotiated . . . through the corporeal and intimate affects that . . . physically constitute, disrupt and repair the boundaries of a public culture” (94).
A particularly fascinating essay on Jewish culture is Sarah M. Ross's essay on Jewish ritual worship. Interviewing members of a congregation about their feelings while singing, Ross is more reflective about her own role as a participant than the authors of other essays. She writes: “At this point, perhaps it is worthwhile to ask why we need to know how emotions are actually perceived by worshippers. Is it too private a matter? The answer might be that . . . such studies will help form a more complete picture of how human beings negotiate emotions, religion, and music.”
The writing in several of these essays is occasionally brilliant and certainly abstruse; an example of both qualities is M. Gail Hamner's essay on religious documentaries. Hamner describes an episode in which a member of an assembly weeps in public while mentioning the death of a colleague. The man is apologetic and the audience apparently uninvolved. Hamner's analysis takes account of the intensity of the man's experience, quickly stifled, and the lack of response of the general audience. Hamner explains: “This kind of transversal, transpersonal affective movement has not historically formed part of social analysis. . . . In this case, an attention to affect theory can analyze how flows of affect work paraconsciously to strengthen or challenge the norms, rules, and expectations of public cultures” (94). Perhaps the heavy-handed prose is unavoidable, since the authors are employing the theory and jargon of several different fields. Despite its difficulty, this imaginative collection of essays should be recommended reading for all students of contemporary theories of emotion.
