The book “Religious Knowledge and Experience,” authored by Alireza Ghaeminia, has been published by the Publishing Organization of the Research Institute for Islamic Culture and Thought. The 540-page volume is now available in the publishing market.
Focusing on one of the fundamental debates in contemporary theology and the philosophy of religion, this work examines the relationship between “religious knowledge” and “religious experience” within the context of intellectual developments in the modern era. In this book, the author endeavors to explore the contexts in which modern conceptions of religion have emerged in Western thought and to analyze their relationship with theological traditions.
According to the book’s content, a perspective gradually formed in the modern era suggesting that religion, rather than being an epistemic system based on revelatory teachings, is fundamentally a form of human encounter with “the Sacred.” In this conception, religious experience is predominantly grounded in human internal feelings and intuition, rather than relying solely on traditional epistemic propositions. Furthermore, in contemporary Western literature, the term “the Sacred” or “the Holy” is widely utilized to refer to the object of religious experience.
This work also addresses the distinction between the concept of “the Sacred” in modern theology and the traditional concept of God in Abrahamic religions. It illustrates how, in certain modern readings, new conceptions of the Sacred have replaced classical understandings of God. Within this framework, the author notes that many emergent concepts in modern theology have developed in an intellectual environment inextricably linked to the idea of the “absence of God” in modern Western thought.
Ultimately, “Religious Knowledge and Experience” presents religious experience as an endeavor to respond to this absence and to redefine the relationship between humanity and the Sacred in the contemporary world.
