Abstract

This essay grows out of an interest in the phenomenology of religion. By that term I do not intend to encompass every descriptive approach to religious phenomena. What I have in mind is the more specific project of applying a basically Husserlian methodology to the task of understanding religious life and experience. In its basic essentials such an approach would involve focusing attention on the structures of the intentional acts, along with their intentional objects, which are understood in advance to be religious; seeking to discover in them what is essential to religion as such, to particular religious traditions, and, in between these, what is essential to the basic types of religion; and rigorously bracketing all questions of the truthfulness and value of religion. As I understand it Paul Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil is an attempt to do phenomenology of religion in this way.