Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is all about the phenomenology of religion, what it feels like from the inside. You get the feeling with James that he would love to have one of these extraordinary religious experiences. The things he describes are frankly quite mad. These people are perhaps having a revelation or are more likely insane, and James seems to think that both might be simultaneously true.
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.
I think I am very drawn to torn souls! James is yet another. This book is about the phenomenology of religion, what it feels like from the inside. James is interested in extraordinary religious experiences, not the humdrum sort, but those that rip a person wide open, reconfigure the world for him. You get the feeling with James that he would love to have one of these extraordinary religious experiences himself. The things he describes are frankly quite mad. These people are perhaps having a revelation or are more likely insane, and James seems to think that both might be simultaneously true. He himself is quite a rational man, but by the way he describes these experiences you can tell that he is longing to have one, too. There is a tremendous amount of pathos and brilliant writing. He is Henry James’s brother and he, too, writes like an angel and like a novelist.
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein graduated from Columbia University, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her PhD in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship. As well as her teaching work she is also a writer whose novels and short stories dramatise the concerns of philosophy. Goldstein’s writings emerge as arguments for the belief that in our time fiction may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence. She says imaginatively inhabiting other lives, which is what we do in literature, can induce a great moral growth.
