Towards a broadening of the concept of religiousexperience: some phenomenologicalconsiderations

The recent philosophical literature on religious experience has mostlybeen concerned with experiences which are taken by the subject of the experience tobe directly of God or some other supernatural entity, or to involve some suspensionof the subject–object structure of conventional experience. In this paper I consider afurther kind of experience, where the sense of God is mediated by way of anappreciation of the existential meanings which are presented by a material context.In this way the paper aims to extend the standard philosophical concept of religiousexperience so as to take account of phenomenological treatments of sacred place,and to give more prominence to the materially mediated or sacramental character ofmuch religious experience