"Recently, many philosophers of religion have sought to defend the rationality of religious belief by shifting the burden of proof onto the critic of religious belief. Matthew Bagger argues that the commitment to supernatural explanations implicit in the religious experiences em…
Medieval Kabbalah was successful because it advanced a powerful way of imagining the meaning and relevance of Judaism in light of the declining political status of Jews in Western Europe and the proliferation of Christian anti-Jewish thought. The kabbalists claimed to reveal a s…
'Sensible Ecstasy' investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques La…
"The mystic, zero, or void experience - the ecstatic disappearance of self along with everything else - is considered by those who have had it to be the most beautiful, blissful, positive, profound, and significant experience of their lives. Offering both a descriptive and a com…
In Yearnings of the Soul, Jonathan Garb uncovers a crucial thread in the story of modern Kabbalah and modern mysticism more generally: psychology. Returning psychology to its roots as an attempt to understand the soul, he traces the manifold interactions between psychology and s…
"In 'Saadya Gaon: The Double Path of the Mystic and the Rationalist' Gyongyi Hegedus offers a new perspective on the thought of the most significant medieval Jewish thinker of the pre-Maimonidean era, Saadya Gaon. Saadya's important philosophical works belong to two distinct tra…
The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism is a multi-authored interdisciplinary guide to the study of Christian mysticism, with an emphasis on the third through the seventeenth centuries. This book looks beyond the term 'mysticism', which was an early modern invention, to e…
