Religion, Experience, and Mind (REM)

Project Summary

The REM project brought together faculty and graduate students from Religious Studies and Psychology to understand the interaction of religion, experience, and mind across traditions and cultures. Their goal was to integrate scientific methods (drawn from the behavioral sciences) with historical, linguistic, and ethnographic methods (drawn from the humanities) to enhance both research and undergraduate teaching about people's perceived religious experiences. The group pursued these goals through reading broadly to develop a shared understanding of psychology's and humanities' study of religious experience, developing research projects that drew on this shared understanding, conducting research leading to academic publications, and bringing insights from their interdisciplinary understanding into both existing undergraduate courses and newly developed courses that exemplified their approach.