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Fits, Trances, and Visions
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Product Description：
Fits, trances, visions, speaking in tongues, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, possession. Believers have long viewed these and similar involuntary experiences as religious--as manifestations of God, the spirits, or the Christ within. Skeptics, on the other hand, have understood them as symptoms of physical disease, mental disorder, group dynamics, or other natural causes. In this sweeping work of religious and psychological history, Ann Taves explores the myriad ways in which believers and detractors interpreted these complex experiences in Anglo-American culture between the mid-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Taves divides the book into three sections. In the first, ranging from 1740 to 1820, she examines the debate over trances, visions, and other involuntary experiences against the politically charged backdrop of Anglo-American evangelicalism, established churches, Enlightenment thought, and a legacy of religious warfare. In the second part, covering 1820 to 1890, she highlights the interplay between popular psychology--particularly the ideas of "animal magnetism" and mesmerism--and movements in popular religion: the disestablishment of churches, the decline of Calvinist orthodoxy, the expansion of Methodism, and the birth of new religious movements. In the third section, Taves traces the emergence of professional psychology between 1890 and 1910 and explores the implications of new ideas about the subconscious mind, hypnosis, hysteria, and dissociation for the understanding of religious experience. Throughout, Taves follows evolving debates about whether fits, trances, and visions are natural (and therefore not religious) or supernatural (and therefore religious). She pays particular attention to a third interpretation, proposed by such "mediators" as William James, according to which these experiences are natural and religious. Taves shows that ordinary people as well as educated elites debated the meaning of these experiences and reveals the importance of interactions between popular and elite culture in accounting for how people experienced religion and explained experience. Combining rich detail with clear and rigorous argument, this is a major contribution to our understanding of Protestant revivalism and the historical interplay between religion and psychology. Amazon.com Review：
Fits, Trances, & Visions is a wide-ranging cultural study of some of the most controversial and dramatic expressions of Christian spirituality. Faith healing, possession, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, speaking in tongues, animal magnetism, and even hypnotized crabs are among the many subjects described by the fearless Ann Taves, a professor of history and religion at Claremont College. The book's primary focus is the debate between religion and psychology about the sources of such dramatic spiritual experiences. From the mid-18th to the early 20th century, believers and skeptics clashed over the question of whether God was supernaturally present in these experiences, or whether they were merely natural expressions of physical disease or psychological disorder. Taves is especially attentive and sympathetic to the conclusion reached in the early 20th century by William James, who argued that charismatic spirituality was both natural and religious. Taves does sometimes get bogged down in theoretical language, but Fits, Trances & Visions is noteworthy for offering sympathetic and sophisticated attention to a realm of religious experience that too often receives little more than scholarly scorn. --Michael Joseph Gross
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