🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£110.00
Out of Stock

Medjugorje and the Supernatural

Science, Mysticism, and Extraordinary Religious Experience

By (author) Daniel Maria Klimek
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York, United States
Published: 19th Apr 2018
Dimensions: w 164mm h 243mm d 33mm
Weight: 654g
ISBN-10: 0190679204
ISBN-13: 9780190679200
Barcode No: 9780190679200
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
In 1981, six young people in the village of Medjugorje, in what was then Yugoslavia (now Bosnia-Herzegovina), reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them. The Medjugorge visionaries say that Mary has returned every day since then, bringing them important messages from heaven to convey to the world. Throughout history, people have reported visionary experiences-apparitions of the Virgin Mary, visions of Jesus Christ, weeping statues and icons, the stigmata, physical healings and miracles, experiences of the afterlife- and interpreted them as supernatural in origin. Scholars have often tried to reinterpret such experiences, including those described by the great mystics like Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Teresa of Avila, into natural or psychopathological categories, like hysteria, hallucination, delusion, epileptic-seizures, psychosis, the workings of the unconscious mind, or fraud. Are such reductionist explanations valid? Over the past three decades the Medjugorje visionaries have been subjected to extensive medical, psychological, and scientific examination, even while undergoing their visionary experiences. Daniel Klimek argues that the case of Medjugorje affords a rare opportunity to understand a deeper dimension of extraordinary religious phenomena. Presenting and analyzing the scientific studies on the visionaries in juxtaposition with the major scholars and debates surrounding religious experience, Klimek concludes that a multidisciplinary approach grants a more holistic and deeper understanding of such extraordinary religious experiences.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New
Out of Stock

What Reviewers Are Saying

Submit your review
Newspapers & Magazines
Klimek's impressive study manages to bring faith and science into earnest conversation in a manner that is both learned and accessible ... This is an important book for anyone desiring a way to think about religious experience that betrays neither faith nor science. * Luke Timothy Johnson, Commonweal Magazine * Klimek deals with this need to know about the nature of the phenomenon, which in this case is something quite extraordinary. In particular, he responds to a major and recurrent ploy that aims to undercut the whole phenomenon by pathologizing it. * Michael Grosso, Religious Studies Review * Like many past entries into this field, Klimek trains his gaze on the scientific study of religious experience, in this case studies that have been done on the psychology and neuroscience of a small group of visionaries who have, for over thirty years, claimed to see daily apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the Balkan village of Medjugorje. What makes Klimek's book noteworthy - and ambitious - is his insistence that these studies both prove the authenticity (and
supernatural nature) of the events at Medjugorje, and provide a new framework for cooperation between science and religion. * Samuel J. Gee, Reading Religion *