ABSTRACT

In considerations of religious knowledge and belief, priority is usually given to the ideational, the internal, the cerebral and the abstract. I will argue that our understanding of religious knowledge and belief is strengthened by paying rather more attention to their direct manifestation, to the material, external and practical. By this I do not wish to suggest that such manifestations are merely representations or indices of somehow more fundamental or genuine forms of knowledge and belief, but that such phenomena constitute knowledge and belief. In these terms, knowledge and belief are immediately sensible, they are heard, tasted, seen, felt and smelt. Thus, religious knowledge and belief are experienced in practice.