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The Joy of Religion: author response to commentaries

The Joy of Religion is a counterpoint work to Sacred Pain (Glucklich, 2001). In that older work from 20 years ago, I attempted to explain the widely distributed religious practice of self-hurting. The explanation was a broad arc that ranged from neuropsychology all the way to elevated cultural discussions surrounding the support for and resistance to anesthetics. However, I skipped much of the literature that contextualizes voluntary pain within evolutionary and cognitive theories. The present book sought to approach affect while filling in that gap, but without repeating the data on pain. But like that other book, the goal was to cover a broad explanatory arc ranging from the bio-psychological and evolutionary all the way to complex cultural context and even the phenomenology of personal experience. And like Sacred Pain, this study belongs as a work in the field of religious studies, but bracketing all theological and normative reflection. Given the range of topics covered within this broad agenda, there are a number of gaps within the explanatory and descriptive trajectory of the work. Some of those gaps are due to the state of the art, others are due to decisions I had to make due to lack of space, and an equal number are due to the limits of my knowledge. The nine commentaries that have been published in response to The Joy of Religion (JOR) are very useful in highlighting some of these gaps, refining and even correcting some of the topics I did handle, and, not least, articulating the functionalist approach to religion, culture and positive affect. I am very grateful to the eleven authors of these commentators for taking the time and generously entering into a conversation on details and the broad agenda of JOR. I am also grateful to Richard Sosis for organizing this conversation. However, it is important to note that none of the commentaries derive from experts in what is generally called “history of religions,” that is, from specialists in Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism or other historically approached religious traditions. That sort of conversation would have to take place in another setting other than Religion, Brain & Behavior. Indeed, the fundamental notion of including all of these distinct religious traditions within a single theoretical scheme, which goes to the heart of essential disputes among religion scholars today, is absent from the current conversation. I will briefly touch on this in the conclusion to this essay. I shall respond to each of the commentaries in turn before writing a general conclusion. It is important to note that all of the commentaries are detailed enough to contain several important points. It is simply beyond the scope of this essay to respond to every observation raised, so I selected for response those points I regarded most salient or interesting. This essay should not be read as a definitive response.