Revelatory Events offers significant promise for advancing our understanding of the emergence of new religious traditions, and will draw serious interest from scholars in several disciplines. -David G. Bromley, director of the World Religions and Spirituality Project, Virginia Commonwealth University Revelatory Events is Taves at her best. She weaves together careful historical description and insightful psychological analysis to examine ... Read morethe biographical, experiential, and social substrates of new religious systems. This is the kind of brilliant scholarship we have come to expect of Taves. -Robert C. Fuller, author of The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America Students of religion have routinely emphasized the importance of exceptional events or experiences-visions or revelations-in the emergence of religious movements. In Revelatory Events, Ann Taves combines history and cognitive psychology in an entirely new way to investigate how small networks of believers can turn an individual's revelation into a social movement, and possibly into a religion. This outstanding book will set the agenda for the psychological and historical study of religious innovation. -Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought Ann Taves uses her skills as a historian to demonstrate that it is not spiritual experience itself that makes revelatory events, and her skills in cognitive science to unpack how events become revelatory. A deeply fascinating book, Revelatory Events helps us rethink spirituality itself. -T. M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God Revelatory Events is a book that anyone studying new religious movements is going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future. . . . [Taves'] comparative work and sophisticated analysis gives us a model for how good scholarship should be done.
-David Feltmate, Nova Religio [A] fascinating and masterfully interdisciplinary study. . . . With the nuance and erudition made possible by Taves's keen historical eye, firm grasp of the cognitive social sciences, and all of the primary resources now available to scholars of religion, Revelatory Events represents the best of the comparative method in twenty-first century scholarship. . . . This book is highly recommended!
-Adam Powell, Journal of Mormon History Show Less