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This chapter examines three important strands of progressive thought in the late nineteenth century to reveal the tensions between ideas about progress, religion, and science, and resulting predictions about America's religious future. This chapter first delineates a populist‐secular group of thinkers, exemplified by Robert Ingersoll, “the great agnostic” proponent of freethinking, whose prophecies blended the older jeremiad form with a heightened emphasis on atheistical science and Enlightment rationality. The second strand of thought explored in this chapter came from the ranks of progressive intellectuals, represented in part by the powerful pragmatic philosophy of religion developed by William James in his book, Varieties of Religious Experience. Finally, this chapter argues for a third diverse group comprised largely of ministers and social gospel activists, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who attempted to reform the nation along explicitly Christian lines.

This chapter scrutinizes James's evolving attempts to reconcile religion and science. Although James is sometimes modest in aiming to preserve a form of religion independent of claims about supernatural entities, his more typical stance is to strive for more. The striving is evident in his early writings and in the many-sided explorations of The Varieties of Religious Experience. The chapter shows how James's arguments in Varieties, whether we credit him with everyday views about truth and knowledge or whether we attribute to him the conceptions he would explicitly develop in Pragmatism, fall short of the more ambitious target. Nor can the different strategy pursued in “The Will to Believe” succeed in establishing a strong religious commitment. For all the ingenuity and subtlety of James's attempts, the most he can cogently defend is a demythologized version of religion, of the sort advanced by Dewey in A Common Faith.

This chapter focuses on William James and his book entitled “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” This book made people view James as unrespectable. His aim was to write, in a nondismissive way, about the human significance of religious experience.

This chapter describes the connection between the obligation William James finds in the reflective life and the resultant personal transformation that provides access to the meaning of that obligation. The relation between obligation and transformation leads James to claim that the development of personal character is a proper aim of philosophical inquiry. The chapter develops this line of thought by following James’s treatment of conversion in Varieties. It shows that James uses his analysis of character and personal transformation to separate himself clearly from the traditional doctrine of religious conversion, and particularly from Jonathan Edwards. It concludes with an analysis and critique of James’s position against conversion and asks what this means for his work in transforming the obligation to the religious life.

The chapter considers influential definitions of terms like “mysticism,” “mystical,” or “mystical experiences” as formulated by two of the most prominent scholars of mysticism of the twentieth century. The influence of William James to the study of mysticism and his famous four marks of a mystical state is observed. The influence of Evelyn Underhill to the study of mysticism and her defining characteristics of what is true mysticism is observed. The various forms of visionary experiences and locutionary experiences (mystically hearing voices) are studied and the nuances between mystical and visionary experiences are considered. Critiques of the work of James and Underhill are offered and brief case studies of three modern mystics—Maria Valtorta, Therese Neumann, and Gemma Galgani—are considered in support of the critiques.

This chapter explores how the experience of wonder gives rise to self-examination and to a mindful awareness of the world. To illustrate this transformative experience, it looks at one individual whose life was shaped by recurring experiences of wonder: William James, one of America's greatest philosophers and psychologists. It shows how James's perceptual, cognitive, and moral orientations to life had been profoundly affected by several distinct experiences of wonder, including “metaphysical illumination.” It also examines James's 1902 classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he argues that personal, mystical experience is the core of authentic religion. Finally, the chapter discusses how James extended empiricism to include humanity's moral and religious experience, reconceptualized spirituality based on the cultivation of certain wonder-charged states of awareness, and established some sort of a middle ground between scientific positivism and revealed religion.