Introduction (Schmidt) 1 Introduction Bettina E. Schmidt University of Wales Trinity Saint David [email protected] The Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, founded by Sir Alister Hardy (1896-1985), houses a unique archive of personal accounts of a religious or spiritual experience. We have now over 6000 narratives, some very short and some over several pages long. Each of them present a unique insight into a personal experience with “a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self” as the so-called Hardy Question phrased it. Some narratives report a Near-Death Experience (NDE), Afterlife experience, or an experience with angels; others speak about the awareness of an overwhelming presence while walking in a crowd or in nature. Among the accounts are experiences from ordinary people of different beliefs and commitments, including agnostics. One of the first accounts describes the uplifting experience the person felt in a hotel room in London in 1948 (RERC 000001). Another refers to an experience in the West Indies, during a walk through the hills of St Kitts (RERC 000011). A common feature in most accounts is the sense of uniqueness of the experience, that it is not possible to repeat it and that it changed one’s perception of things, sometimes even their life. Because of the highly personal and subjective perception of the experience, the accounts are difficult to examine in an objectified, quantitative manner. Nonetheless, over time several scholars have worked with the accounts and published their analysis of them, from Alister Hardy (e.g., 1966, 1997) to David Hay (1982) and Peter Fenwick (1997), to name just a few. The new issue of the Journal for the Study of Religious Experience continues the tradition of Alister Hardy and presents a range of approaches to the study of religious experience, some of them with reference to some of the accounts while others refer to different examples of non-ordinary experiences. The first article is by June Boyce-Tillman and is based on her Alister Hardy Lampeter Lecture given in 2015. Focussing on the study of angels, Boyce-Tillman shows various analytical frames to examine stories on angels. One of her themes is the spiritual experience in music as Boyce-Tillman combines academic scholarship and rigour with her experience as performer. The following article by Jonathan Tuckett also discusses different methodologies in the study of religious experience. His focus is on 1 All accounts referenced with a six digit number following the acronym RERC are from the Archive of the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter, UK. Issue 3 ©2017 Journal for the Study of Religious Experience ISSN: 2057-2301 2 Journal for the Study of Religious Experience phenomenology of religious experience and he discusses the differences between two phenomenological accounts of what it means to study religious experience. His critical engagement with Ninian Smart and other phenomenologists presents an interesting insight into the study of religious experiences. The following two articles present case studies that take the study of religious experience in two different areas. Valerie Duffy-Cross presents the result of a small- scale empirical study about children’s spirituality and silence. Following in the footsteps of David Hay, a former director of RERC, Duffy-Cross, a former school teacher and current PhD student, investigates the impact of opportunities for, and attitudes towards silence and solitude on children’s spirituality. Luc M. H. De Backer examines conversion, a religious experience with life-changing impact, however, not from a Christian background but from a Hindu tradition. De Backer shows in his study that is based on fieldwork in various European centres of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) the different understanding of conversion within Hinduism and how it affects people. The final article is by Adam Powell who presents initial results of the ‘Hearing the Voice’ project (Durham University). The project explores within a multi-disciplinary framework hallucinatory-type phenomena in an attempt to revaluate and reframe discussions of these experiences. The focus is on four cases of experiences with supernatural voices and visions in the United States from the first half of the nineteenth century. Powell uses the historical cases to examine the value of bio-cultural models of religious experience. This third issue of the Journal for the Study of Religious Experience shows the richness of the area and the range of scholars involved in it. From theoretical contributions to empirical studies, from historical cases to the 21st century, from professors, post-docs and PhD students, the study of religious and spiritual experience is diverse and multi- disciplinary, no longer a forgotten path for a few handful of scholars but a rich field that produces fascinating research projects and insights into human experiences. References Fenwick, P. & Fenwick, E. (1997) The Trust in the Light: An Investigation of over 300 Near-Death Experiences. New York: Berkeley Trade. Hardy, A. (1966) The Divine Flame: An Essay towards a Natural History of Religion. Oxford: Religious Experience Research Unit. —— (1979) The Spiritual Nature of Man. Oxford: Clarendon. Hay, D. (1982) Exploring Inner Space: Scientists and Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Issue 3 ©2017 Journal for the Study of Religious Experience ISSN: 2057-2301 Crystallising the angels (Boyce-Tillman) 3 Crystallising the Angels: A Methodological Proposal for the Study of Angels Reverend Dr June Boyce-Tillman, MBE University of Winchester / North-West University, South Africa [email protected] This article will explore the complex issues involved in the study of angels, examining various frames to accommodate the variety of data available. The data includes accounts of people’s experiences and questionnaires associated with them, reported visionary experiences and a variety of artistic sources. These will include images (such as Hildegard’s choir of angels), poems (such as those of Rilke), historical accounts (such as the biblical account of the Annunciation) and music (such as Elgar's’ Dream of Gerontius and hymn texts). The methodology will build on Fiona Bowie’s cognitive empathetic engagement (2014), adding to this, methodologies from the area of Performance-As-Research (Boyce- Tillman et al 2013). These will be put together within the developing methodology of crystallisation which “combines multiple forms of analysis and multiple genres of representation into a coherent text”, to build a rich account of the phenomenon problematising its construction, highlighting researchers’’ positionality and examining socially constructed meanings to reveal the indeterminacy of knowledge claims (Ellingson 2009). Within these it will draw on Boyce-Tillman’s analysis of elements within the spiritual experience (Boyce-Tillman 2016) into the areas of Metaphysical, Narrative, Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, Extra-personal and InterGaian. Keywords: Angels, Methodology, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, Music, Art, Psychoanalysis Introduction This paper is concerned with a complex topic because of the nature of the available data on angels. The story of angels is one that has been an extraordinarily resilient story in human history,1 epitomised by the centrality of the Sanctus2 to the Eucharistic liturgy. The question for this paper concerns why the stories of angels have succeeded and what evidence has been used to support them. Have they survived because they are true, or because they are helpful or because the dominant culture has supported them (Foucault/Gordon 1980)? In the latter area the attitude of the dominant culture has changed dramatically over the years in Europe. Brynjulf Stige (2002) emphasises 1 It was Beth Shapiro1, Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz who linked fiction and non-fiction books in at the Hay Literary festival who asked why some stories succeed. 2What do people think of this act? There are those who see it simply as part of a tradition, and that angels are simply relics of a bygone age and we have moved on, while others still rejoice in the continual help of the angels especially their guardian angel or see each time a beautiful image of the glories of heaven. Issue 3 ©2017 Journal for the Study of Religious Experience ISSN: 2057-2301 4 Journal for the Study of Religious Experience how meaning necessarily reflects the norms, values and assumptions of a particular context. Interestingly it is a debate of the relative value of human reason and intuition (Boyce-Tillman 2005) – the interface within human experience of two different but interfacing ways of knowing which at some times have been seen in our history as opposed to one another and incompatible. The notion of holding these two ways of knowing together with several others is the substance of this paper.3 The evidence concerning angels draws on a variety of different sources. There are historical texts of one kind or another and theological expositions. There is data from a number of artistic sources such as music, poetry, image and drama. These have been analyzed from cultural perspectives using methodologies from such disciplines as religious studies. Finally, there are accounts of experiences