Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (review

Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. "Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (review)"
Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality - Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2001, pp. 237-240
The Johns Hopkins University Press


Excerpt


Ann Taves, professor of the history of Christianity and American religion at Claremont, has written a monumental and momentous book about ecstatic religious experiences--phenomena like falling into trance states, shouting, speaking in tongues--and the competing ways they have been understood. Several years of special studies in psychology during the early 1990s, added to her ongoing work in religious history, enabled Taves to construct a substantial foundation for the present work. The book may be likened to a rambling three-story American house with very many rooms, some elegantly refined and others housing the poor, all surprisingly interconnected by [End Page 237] hallways and staircases or previously undetected secret passages. Indeed, when we look again the house suddenly seems more like a unified whole than it had at first, although Taves is not interested in how it holds together on the outside so much as how its parts are connected on the inside. She warns against any method that would reduce the varieties of experience--especially the kind of "involuntary" experiences that interest her here--to some model of "religion-in-general," arguing that "the experience of religion cannot be separated from the communities of discourse and practice that gave rise to it without becoming something else." Resisting scholarship's "power to colonize" (353), Taves engages the wide range of individuals and movements that are her subjects with astonishing sympathy and sensitivity. Thirteen well-placed illustrations and 70 pages of endnotes (a number of which are helpful short essays in their own right) augment the text. For all the weight of its scholarship, this book can also be placed in that rarest class in academic publishing--it's a page-turner. We end up really wanting to read the "Conclusion," to catch a glimpse of where Taves' Jamesian interest in "living religion" as "things in the makng" or