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Experience, Body, and Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Paula M. Cooey
Paula M. Cooey
Affiliation:
Trinity University
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Extract

Understanding the role played by emotion in relation to culture and nature is relevant to theories of religion and to issues of theological method. The extent to which one grants emotion independence from cognition may well determine whether one views religious experience as an avenue available to free one from culture or simply as the product of culture. In theories of religion the role played by emotion may determine both the integrity granted the subject's account of her or his experience and the appropriate methods for interpreting the general significance of the account. In regard to theological methodology, the role played by emotion will likely indicate whether experience is viewed as a relative consequence of construction and critique or the authoritative starting point for construction and critique.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , July 1989 , pp. 325 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1989

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References

1 Davaney, Sheila Greeve, “Problems with Feminist Theory: Historicity and the Search for Sure Foundations,” in Paula M. Cooey, Sharon A. Farmer, and Mary Ellen Ross, eds., Embodied Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988) 79–86.Google Scholar

2 See, e.g., Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

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20 Ibid.

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26 Ibid., 125, 127; emphasis in original.

27 Ibid., 129.

28 Ibid., 155–57.

29 Davaney, “Problems with Feminist Theory,” 93–94, and Cady, “Theories of Religion.”

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31 Ibid., 27–59.

32 Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 127–31.

33 Scarry, Body in Pain, 181–243.