It is from the paranormal's multifaceted nature that the title of this book takes its meaning. Throughout its pages we encounter, time and again, talk of a wide variety of dimensions, levels and layers, from social, cultural, psychological and physiological dimensions, to spiritual, mythic, narrative, symbolic and experiential dimensions, and onwards to other worlds, planes of existence and realms of consciousness. The paranormal is, by its very nature, multidimensional.

"Once again, Jack Hunter takes us down the proverbial rabbit hole, here with the grace, nuance and sheer intelligence of a gifted team of essayists, each working in her or his own way toward new theories of history, consciousness, spirit, the imagination, the parapsychological, and the psychedelic. Another clear sign that there is high hope in high strangeness, and that we are entering a new era of thinking about religion, about mind, about us." -- Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-hunter/strange-dimensions/paperback/product-22288579.html

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Dimensions-Jack-Hunter/dp/1326360108

​Contents: 

Editor's Introduction: Many Strange Dimensions - Jack Hunter 

Foreword: Playing with the Impossible - Joseph Laycock 

Part 1: Ethnographies of the Anomalous 

1. Profane Illuminations: Machines, Indian Ghosts, and Boundless Flights Through Nature at Contemporary Paranormal Gatherings in America - Darryl Caterine 

2. Hearing the Voice of God - Tanya Luhrmann 

3. Life is Not About Chasing the Wind: Investigating the Connection Between Bodily Experience, Beliefs and Transcendence Amongst Christian Surfers - Emma Ford 

4. Communication Across the Chasm: Experiences With the Deceased - John A. Napora 

5. The Paranormal Body: Reflections on Indian Perspectives Towards the Paranormal - Loriliai Biernacki 

Part 2: Making Sense of Spiritual Experience 

6. From Sleep Paralysis to Spiritual Experience: An Interview With David David J. Hufford - John W. Morehead 

7. A Matter of Spirit: An Imaginal Perspective on the Paranormal - Angela Voss 

8. The Spectrum of Specters: Making Sense of Ghostly Encounters - Michael Hirsch, Jammie Price, Meghan McDonald & Mahogany Berry-Artis 

9. “Spirits are the Problem”: Anthropology and Conceptualising Spiritual Beings - Jack Hunter 

10. The Brain and Spiritual Experience: Towards a Neuroscientific Hermeneutic - Andrew B. Newberg 

Part 3: High Strangeness 

11. Playback Hex: William Burroughs and the Magical Objectivity of the Tape Recorder - James Riley 

12. Crop Circles as Psychoid Manifestation: Borrowing Jung’s Analysis of UFOs to Approach the Phenomenon of the Crop Circle - William Rowlandson 

13. The Para-Anthropology of UFO Abductions: The Case for the Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis - Steven Mizrach 

Part 4: Consciousness, Psychedelics and Psi 

14. Navigating to the Inside: First Person Science Perspectives on Consciousness and Psi - Rafael Locke 

15. Connecting, Diverging and Reconnecting: Putting the Psi Back in Psychedelic Research - David Luke 

16. A Paradigm-Breaking Hypothesis for Solving the Mind-Body Problem - Bernardo Kastrup

​
​Examining the recent radical re-invention of monastic tradition in the everyday life of New Monastic Communities, Exploring New Monastic Communities considers how, growing up in the wake of Vatican II, new Catholic communities are renewing monastic life by emphasizing the most innovative and disruptive theological aspects which they identify in the Council. Despite freely adopting and adapting their Rule of Life, the new communities do not belong to pre-existing orders or congregations: they are gender-mixed with monks and nuns living under the same roof; they accept lay members whether single, married or as families; they reject enclosure; they often limit collective prayer time in order to increase time for labour, evangelization and voluntary social work; and are actively involved in oecumenical and interreligious dialogue, harbouring thinly-veiled sympathy with oriental religions, from which they sometimes adopt beliefs and practices.
Offering unique sociological insights into New Monastic Communities, and shedding light on questions surrounding New Religious Movements more generally, the book asks what 'monastic' means today and whether these communities can still be described as 'monastic'.

Published by Ashgate AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Series in December 2015.

- ‘Exploring with subtlety the nebula of the new Catholic monastic communities, Stefania Palmisano offers a very penetrating insight into the innovative richness of present attempts to reinvent monasticism as an integral Christian style of life, made compatible with the contemporary culture of the individual.’
Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris, France

- ‘Richly descriptive and theoretically astute, this study shines light on a fascinating set of religious experiments. Far from disappearing into the mists of history, monastic communities are being reinvented, and Palmisano rightly challenges us to pay attention.’
Nancy T. Ammerman, Boston University, USA

Stefania Palmisano is Associate Professor; Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Turin, Italy and Member of the Afterlife Research Centre

Website: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472431936

​We are pleased to announce the launch of the First Issue of the Journal for the Study of Religious Experience with articles on William James (by Peggy Morgan), mediumship (by Jack Hunter), religious experience in Turkey (by Cafe Yaran), Ecstasy and Entasy (by Peter Connolly) and two contributions to religious experience in the UK (by Leslie Francis and Jeff Astley).
 
JSRE is an online, open access peer-reviewed journal promoted by the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC), University of Wales Trinity Saint David. It publishes original papers promoting theoretical, methodological and ethnographical developments in the research on spiritual or religious experience, in the area of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and religious studies.
 
The First Issue is now available online:
 
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/issue/view/3
 

6th ETHNOGRAPHY AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH CONFERENCE
University of Bergamo (Italy) – June 8-11, 2016

Panel Convenors: Alberta Giorgi (Universidade de Coimbra), Stefania Palmisano(University of Torino) and Giovanna Rech (University of Trento)

Religion today lies at the heart of a cultural and political debate, related to immigration, human rights, the role of women and democracy in general. Various questions are asked about what criteria define a lay, pluralistic space and its physical and symbolical boundaries. From this point of view examination of multiple expressions of religiosity in the human body, in physical and symbolic spaces and in the relationship among individuals, and between individuals and space, assumes critical importance.
For over a century, social sciences have been highlighting that “religion” is a plural category, a composite set of organizations, actors, practices, beliefs, meanings, relations, values and traditions. Since the 1980s, the concept of “lived religion” has expressed a living, fluid, pluralistic and everyday dimension of religions: religion is part of daily life; religiosity is expressed through a variable set of collective and individual, institutionalised and informal, hybrid and codified practices.
We believe that an ethnographical prospective allows us productively to examine such religious ecology and with this end in view we invite contributions dealing with the theme of religion in daily life – lived religion – based on solid empirical analysis.
The areas in which the theme may be declined include:

• Native religions in today’s world;
• Religious tradition and innovation;
• Female religious experience, for example in churches, in alternative spirituality, in religious groups/movements and in politics;
• Mobile religion including pilgrimages and religious tourism;
• Religion, economics and consumption;
• Religion, the human body and mass media.

Proposal submission deadline: 15 January 2016
http://www.etnografiaricercaqualitativa.it/?page_id=27 

CALL FOR PAPERS: The 33rd ISSR Conference “Sensing Religion”
Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium),  2-5 July 2015.

Session STS 51
Bodily Dimension, Experience, and Ethnographic Research 

Session organisers: 
Dr Alberto GROISMAN, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil) 
Dr Emily PIERINI, University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UK)

The growing interest of researchers in reflecting upon and thickening their relationships with participants in religious groups has prompted a critical review of reductionist or rationalizing analytical perspectives concerning religious experience. It seems that the appeal of "taking seriously" what people say about their religious experiences is becoming increasingly consistent. Several dialogical forms are being developed to approach the use of techniques, resources, plants, substances and other strategies used in religious contexts to modify the states of consciousness and the practitioners' relationship with the world. Besides anthropologists, researchers in different fields have also considered bodily engagement in the field—and often in these practices—as an important opportunity for research and reflection, and ethnography as a way to present their findings.

We invite researchers to reflect upon the construction of knowledge through sensory experience in the context of mediumistic and shamanic groups considering questions such as: how does the sensory experience of participants shape their religious knowledge? How does the researcher's bodily experience in researching among these groups inform the production of ethnographic knowledge?

This session raises questions about the bodily involvement of researchers working with religious experiences. Papers may discuss the methodological implications of the body in the field and the ways in which to convey these experiences through ethnography, by addressing the empirical, ethical, epistemological and analytical implications of this significant aspect of fieldwork.

Link to the Programme and Abstracts

Rev. Dr. Jeff Leonardi wrote the following report on the conference held in Lampeter, UK on 4.7.14, to relaunch the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre at the University of Wales Trinity saint David.

A Response to The Study of Religious Experience conference held at Lampeter on 4th July 2014.

I have recently retired to the Lampeter area and was pleased that this 'relaunch' for the Alister Hardy Centre was to take place just after we moved here. My background is in counselling and ordained ministry and in 2008 I completed doctoral research into the relationship between the spirituality of the Person-centred approach to counselling and Christian spirituality, and the implications for Christian ministry and pastoral practice. I had quoted from David Hay's work in defining spirituality and religious experience, and I was delighted to discover that the Alister Hardy Centre is now based in Lampeter.

The first presentation, by Fiona Bowie on 'How to study religious experience? Methodological reflections on the study of the afterlife and other examples of religious experience', made me realise how oppressed I feel as a British citizen in espousing spiritual and religious experience in the climate of polite scepticism and dismissal that characterises so much of our public discourse. This recognition came in response to Dr Bowie's fearless declaration of her evidence based conviction of the realities underlying so many of the experiences to which she referred.

As the day progressed I perceived there to be an interesting 'fault line' between the academically credible study of such experience, akin to anthropology -  'this is what the natives believe' - but without any claim to affirm the ontological reality of the experiences, on the one hand, and those such as Fiona Bowie, who took the further step of crediting the source of the experiences beyond a simple subjectivism. (She made more than one reference to the difficulty of receiving academic respectability for such views, particularly at early stages of promotion, and suggested that perhaps academic staff only felt 'safe' to hold such views when they had secured a tenured post!).

It seems to me that there is a real challenge here for this area of study. The nature of spiritual and religious experience when experienced at any kind of depth is that it is transformative, life-changing and life-shaping. There could be said to be a danger for the researcher, if he or she maintains the required scientific distance and objectivity, of recording others' accounts of powerful spiritual experience while maintaining a detached and therefore uncommitted attitude towards that to which their accounts refer: an 'out there' reality with the power to change lives for the good.

In saying this I do not mean to suggest that every experience be given equal credibility, or that scientific objectivity is unnecessary or undesirable in such research. But if one engages in some depth with the experience of others with 'a form of cognitive, empathetic engagement (which) implies openness to the other, critical awareness of one's own perspective, and reluctance to move too quickly to explanation' (from Dr Bowie's abstract for her talk), then one may indeed find oneself sufficiently respectful as to accord their experience, when viewed alongside one's own, as suggestive of, at least a shared reality, or even a level of experiential truth, and with 'anthropological wonder' (ibid).

Dr Schmidt's presentation on spirit possession and trance in Brazil was tantalising in just this regard. Her account of being present to such experience, accompanied by visual illustrations, inspired more than one of her audience to try to ask what she had made of it personally and not purely objectively - and indeed whether she had been touched by it in the sense of beginning to experience something subjectively at the time - but she wouldn't be drawn, maintaining an impressively scientific stance towards her subject matter.

Dr Jansen's presentation in relation to Chinese culture was also tantalising in leaving me, at least, wanting to hear much more of substance about his extensive experience of contemporary Chinese culture, behaviour and attitudes in relation to historical perspectives.

Dr Pope's session led into the later one by Dr Williams, in that both were concerned with the place of experience in Christian tradition. His presentation helped explain the almost distrust of personal spiritual and religious experience in relation to the 'surer ground' of systematic theology and scriptural authority. Dr Williams took our focus to Early Christian beliefs in relation to personal religious experience, and in particular St Paul's own accounts of his experience, especially in 2 Corinthians 12, his 'third heaven experience'. It is tempting to interpret Paul's third-party self references: 'I know a man ..' as proceeding from both humility and a diffidence about claiming such experience, a diffidence that could be said to continue today.

In the question time following her presentation I asked about the dividing line between scripture and later Christian experience. I have long been intrigued by the question of why the NT ends where it does in Acts. In an obvious sense Acts is 'The Acts of the Apostles', and when they died out their acts were over, but I believe there is some merit in considering whether there might not have been continuing acts by their successors which could have been deemed worthy of record? In this sense my question was simply about the closure of the Canon.

But in the context of the conference theme, I think it might be argued that by enshrining only the foundational documents and accounts in the Canon, and making no equivalent space for continuing revelation and testimony, the early Church made inevitable the separation of doctrine from ongoing experience, and the longer the time lapse the greater the potential discrepancy between teaching and experience. In this way one might argue that the attempt to affirm the value of researching religious experience is in conflict with the legacy and modality of tradition.

In conclusion I should like to make one further observation. It seems to me that a great deal of the study of religious experience is formulated in terms of individual experience. The particular focus of my research has been into the spirituality of therapeutic experience, that is when two or more persons are engaging at relational depth. I would be interested to develop this perspective further in the context of the Alister Hardy Centre's explorations.

(Rev Dr) Jeff Leonardi

XXI World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions
Erfurt University, Germany
23-29 August 2015

Panel Convenors: Prof Almut-Barbara Renger (Freie Universität Berlin) and Prof Bettina Schmidt (University of Wales Trinity Saint David)

Body knowledge – ‘knowledge about the body’ and ‘knowledge of the body’ - is an integral part of the history of knowledge, which examines the interweaving of cognitive processes, social values and cultural practices across disciplinary traditions and boundaries of cultures and societies beyond.

This panel will take a closer look at the processes involved in the transfer of body knowledge within a religious context. The aim of the panel is to discuss how body knowledge is passed on from teacher to student, doctor to patient, authors to readers, religious specialists to believers. Does the mediation take place verbally or non-verbally? How are these transfer processes described in text, interpreted and contextualized? We want to reconstruct processes of the production and dissemination of knowledge and discuss, for instance, how this knowledge is transferred in and between cultures. Despite all attempts to codify knowledge we argue that something changes in the transfer from one context to another, from one person to another. We are interested in processes of body knowledge both within and between European and non-European cultures.

We invite panelists to analyze the interaction of various factors as well as the interaction between the physical carriers of body knowledge and the environment. The panel will look in detail at practices and techniques which are based on physical skills. In addition we want to analyze how non-verbal experiences which arise from such practices and techniques, are interpreted within each socio-cultural context, whether it us presented in text genres, visual media, rituals and other performances. Finally we want to investigate how knowledge changes when transferred into different cultural contexts and constellations and how they are integrated.

If interested, please send an abstract (app. 150 words) by email to renger@zedat.fu-berlin.de and b.schmidt@tsd.uwtsd.ac.uk.

Canterbury Christ Church University
North Holmes Road, Canterbury, Kent
Saturday 7 June 2014 | 6.15pm-7.45pm

Open Lectures of the MA in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred

Anthropologists have often dismissed widespread beliefs in spirits and ancestors, communication with the dead, and descriptions of the afterlife realms, as ‘primitive’, fanciful or simply mistaken. Whether we look at small-scale societies, Western or Eastern cultures, however, we see many similarities in afterlife beliefs, suggesting that they may in fact have their origins in personal experience. Culture shapes the ways in which experiences are interpreted but cannot necessarily account for their existence in the first place. I will give some examples from different cultures of esoteric phenomena that may have an experiential source, including reincarnation, after death communication, near death experiences, and out of body travel. I then explore some of the ways in which we can study the afterlife using ethnographic methodologies, using information from a wide variety of cultures, sources and periods. The findings lend weight to the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, with a move away from both a Western post-Enlightenment optic and a post-modern cultural relativism. The starting point of such a study is to take the views of informants seriously. It demands an open-minded approach that values human experience and accepts that there is much that we can’t explain and don’t yet know about the world in which we live.
Info and booking: http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/community-arts-education/open-lectures.asp

ARC member Bettina Schmidt, Andrew Dawson, and Daniel Clark discuss 'The Changing Face of Religion in Brazil' on BBC Radio 4's 'Beyond Belief'. 
Listen online:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b043wvxz