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Religion And Spiritual Experience: Revisiting Key Assumptions In Sociology, Steven F. Cohn, Kyriacos C. Markides

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

In this paper, we examine the dominant materialist assumption that there is an inherent conflict between sociology, religion, and spirituality. We will suggest that such a conflict is not fundamental and that accepting the possibility that religious experiences might reflect contact with a transcendent reality can enrich the theoretical possibilities of sociology, supplementing rather than replacing existing insights.