james

My course will begin with William James. You can read the entire book on line at http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm
among many other sites. Or you can buy a copy for under $5.00 in any used bookstore or online. I recommend buying a copy!
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I recently recommended it to a scientist/atheist friend of mine who read it and said, "It was a fascinating account of many people's experience, but what was his point?" I have to admit, I was stumped as there was no way I could recite the propositions that James puts forth about religion in this amazing book.
Perhaps that is the reason that all the psychology and religion books I read begin with a chapter on James but then don't seem to build upon his theories --there is no system based on them, nor a school that follows them.
I learned by reading an essay in Glock and Hammond, Beyond the Classics(1973) that my friend's question was a good one and my lack of an answer was not for lack of having read and loved this classic text.
The title of James' book(the text of his Gifford Lectures) is instructive. It is about varieties, plural. And it is about experience, not theory. James would not want to leave behind a system or to create a school of thought, at least not a school of thought about religion. According to the essay in this book, what we get from James' Varieties is a spirit in which to study religion. To simplify: he opposed any orthodoxy, be it that of an organized religion or that of a reductionist social scientist. His book was an argument against both.
Here are the opening lines of the essay:
The coordinators of this volume ask me to discuss the “central propositions” of The Varieties of Religious Experience. How William James would hoot at the assignment ... Thought,least of all James’s, has no center; thought, least of all James’s, cannot be captured bypropositions. Thought, most of all James’s is a living flow. (p. 291)
Jews reading James often get as far as his definition of religion( “the feelings,
acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend
themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” -Lecture
II, 1902) and call it a day. But this is a mistake.