[Asec] Call for abstracts, Conference “Religious Experience and Description", Oct 10-12, 2019 Valparaiso, please post

[Olga Louchakova-Schwartz]

*Call for Abstracts “Religious Experience and Description" *

*3d Regional Conference of the Society for Phenomenology of Religious
Experience*

October 10- 12, 2019 Valparaiso University, Indiana, USA

Conference is co-hosted by the Departments of Psychology, Philosophy, and
Theology

*http://sophere.org/conferences/regional-conference-indiana-2019/
<http://sophere.org/conferences/regional-conference-indiana-2019/>*



The purpose of this conference is to examine the difficulties and
possibilities, and theoretical problems and hands-on solutions arising in
the description of religious experience.  Does religious experience harbor
concealed empirical and phenomenological complexity, and how do we address
complexity in a focused description which aims at revealing the essence of
experience?

We invite an interplay between pragmatics of describing religious
experience, philosophical and theological issues involved in creation of
description, and theoretical models of how religious and spiritual
experience may be described.  The conference accepts papers dedicated to
description of perception, imagination, body-awareness, recollection,
social cognition, self-experience, temporality etc. in the context of
religious experience. The papers should provide not just the description of
experience *per se*, but an analysis of the process or outcome of
description and reflection on what description of religious experience *per
se*entails.  Such reflections must employ phenomenological philosophy, such
as e.g. in the work of Anthony Steinbock or Jean-Luc Marion, but can also
draw on contemporary dialogues between phenomenological philosophy and
other philosophical and theological traditions, such as we see in the work
of researchers like Espen Dahl, Matthew Ratcliffe, Dan Zahavi, Stanley
Cavell,  or Evan Thompson, to name a few.We welcome paper proposals related
to the main theme of the conference, but not necessarily bound by the
topics listed below.



Initial themes to open the dialogue:



*I. Creating Descriptions of Religious Experience*

   - How does one actually describe religious experience? What difficulties
   and delights are in this process? How do we clarify such descriptions?
   - How does the process/outcome of describing religious experience differ
   from of ordinary experience?
   - How does one approach the negative (absences) and the positive
   (presences) in these descriptions?
   - How does description capture embodied, affective, and metaphysical
   aspects of experience?
   - What are the relationships between the description and the essence of
   religious experience. What determines experience as religious, or
   spiritual, and gives it a unique character, intelligible to others?
   - How do the questions of otherness or strangeness play out in
   description and understanding a description of religious and spiritual
   experience?
   - Who can understand a description of religious experience? Academic
   researchers?  Religious practitioners or authorities?  Informed consumers?
   Contemporaries or successors?
   - Can religious and spiritual experience be described by means of
   natural language, or does it require some kind of special language?Do
   neologisms clarify or do they obfuscate religious experiences?
   - What are the functions of language in description of religious or
   spiritual experience?
   - How does historicity impact a description of religious experience?
   - What are the communicological virtues in description of religious
   experience?
   - What are the relationships between the description and the phenomena
   “in excess”?
   - What are the purposes of description of religious experience, and how
   intentions in communication already presuppose the structure of description
   of religious experience we find in texts?

*II. Models for Descriptions of Religious and Spiritual Experience*

   - How do phenomenological theories and frameworks influence description
   of religious experience? For example, would a description intended to serve
   as a ground of phenomenological analyses along the lines of Husserl’s
   phenomenology be identical with a description of experience in the
   phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion or non-intentional phenomenology of Michel
   Henry?  Or can such a description reflect a “view from nowhere”?
   - What role do religious beliefs play in religious experience, and can
   phenomenology provide a clarification of religious presuppositions?
   - How, and to what extent, can disciplines other than phenomenology
   (e.g. psychology, psychiatry, neurology, anthropology, theology) provide
   person-level descriptions of phenomenological relevance?
   - How can the phenomenological description of religious experience
   change existing models and theoretical assumptions in other fields of
   knowledge or in phenomenology itself? For instance, can empirical findings
   in religious experiencing refine and improve classical phenomenological
   analyses?
   - Can religious experience be subjected to constitutive phenomenological
   analysis, and can a phenomenological account of any given aspect of
   religiosity provide an accurate or adequate description of religious
   phenomena? How do claims to presuppositionlessness affect such accounts?
   - How does the question of authority play out in first person
   description and the analysis of second person description in texts? What
   ethical limitations exist in descriptions or discussions of religious
   experience from either a first or second-person standpoint?
   - Can common-sense metaphysics support the demands in description of
   religious experiencing?



Keynote Speakers TBA



*Scientific Committee*

*Jason Alvis *(University of Vienna), *Michael Barber* (Saint Louis
University), *Peter Costello*(Providence College), *Neal DeRoo* (The King’s
University, Canada), *Martin Nitsche* (Institute of Philosophy of the
Prague Academy of Sciences), *Olga Louchakova-Schwartz* (Jesuit School of
Theology of Santa Clara University and UC Davis), *Kristof Oltvai* (The
University of Chicago).



*Conference Directors*

*Jim Nelson*, Ph.D., Psychology (Jim.Nelson at valpo.edu)

*Aaron Preston*, Ph.D., Philosophy (Aaron.Preston at valpo.edu)



*Submission:*  abstract of approximately 300 words to
*conferencevalpo at sophere.org
<conferencevalpo at sophere.org> *. You can also enclose a paper of 3000 words
(i.e. 30 min reading time). Submissions with ready papers will be given a
priority. Session proposals with at least three presentations are also
welcome, and must include abstracts of at least three presentations, a
clear title of the session, a name of its chair, and a short description of
the session. Abstracts have to be written in English. Submission should
have two copies of the abstract: a .doc file which includes your name,
paper title, affiliation, up to five key words, and full contact
information, and a .pdf file formatted for anonymous review.  Submission
deadline July 1, 2019. Notifications of acceptance will be issued by August
1, 2019.



Selected papers from the conference will be invited for publication in the
topical issue of Open Theology, De Gruyter, “Phenomenology of Religious
Experience IV: The Description”, planned for 2020.

-- 

Olga Louchakova-Schwartz, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Hult International Business School
olga.louchakova-schwartz at faculty.hult.edu
Clinical Professor, UC Davis School of Medicine
olouch at ucdavis.edu
Adjunct lecturer in Spirituality and Phenomenology of Religion, Jesuit
School of Theology
Associate Editor, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
Founding President, Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience
www.sophere.org
AARWR, Philosophy of Religion Unit Chair
For papers, see https://ucdavis.academia.edu/OlgaLouchakova
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