The Religion & Culture Web Forum

September 2006

Learning Religion at the Vineyard:
Prayer, Discernment and Participation in the Divine

By Tanya Luhrmann
Max Palevsky Professor in the Committee on Human Development
University of Chicago

Respondents:

Heather Curtis, Harvard University
Joel Robbins, University of California-San Diego
Richard A. Rosengarten, University of Chicago
Angela Tarango, Duke University

Click here to read their comments on the discussion board.

In this month’s Web Forum, Tanya Luhrmann examines religious practices at a Vineyard Church in Chicago, a continuation of research begun in a California congregation. She sets common Vineyard practices—prayer, reading and journaling about prayer—into the context of classic and contemporary anthropological, psychological, and cognitive theory about absorption states:

What an observer sees clearly in Nora’s story is a learning process in which inner psychological phenomena — moments which earlier she would have regarded as her own, wandering mind — are identified as the voice of an external presence. An observer could see that Nora is engaging in intense absorption practices which probably enhance her ability to attend to inner phenomena and probably enhance the likelihood of experiencing unusual psychological phenomena, such as hearing the voice of God. Finally, an observer can see that Nora has learned to experience these moments not as random, curious phenomena, but as the communications of an intentional, person-like entity. That is exactly what Levy-Bruhl meant by participation: that one experiences one’s mind as participated in by another awareness, and as affecting that other awareness, that the outer world is full of intentional, interactive consciousness, a “mystic influence which is communicated, under conditions themselves of mystic nature, from one being or object to another.”

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