Emotions and/in Religion

Several contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists (Robert C. Solomon, Antonio Damasio, Martha Nussbaum, Jenefer Robinson and others) have challenged, and even reversed the traditionally negative view of emotions, and have made the topic culturally respectable and relevant. However, religious emotion has been largely neglected in their work (as opposed, for example, to aesthetic emotion), so that the time seems to have come to explore this aspect in depth. One may start to do so by connecting recent theories on emotions in general to those of three authors whose works have been crucial in the field of the Comparative Study of Religions since the early decades of the twentieth century: i.e. Sigmund Freud, Rudolph Otto and William James. In fact, the issue of emotions in religion plays a prominent part in their research, which is articulated according to obviously different disciplinary methodologies and protocols, but which is similarly cognizant of the central role of emotions in religion.