J Relig Health (2008) 47:516–524 DOI 10.1007/s10943-008-9200-3 ORIGINAL PAPER
William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience Revisited Curtis W. Hart
Published online: 7 August 2008 Blanton-Peale Institute 2008
Abstract This essay addresses the familial, religious, and cultural context for the writing and presentation of William James’ classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience. The essay emphasizes the importance of the impact of Henry James, Senior, upon his son. This relationship along with a severe cardiac condition contributed to James’ taking on and carrying through with his exploration of religious experience. The article explores The Varieties and concludes with a discussion of the importance of James’ use of narrative to the study of mind–body medicine. This paper was originally presented at the Richardson Research Seminar in the History of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Keywords William James Religious experience Sick soul Healthy mindedness Mind–body medicine Consciousness Twice born
Introduction In a heartfelt letter of farewell written in 1779, Abigail Adams addresses her son, John Quincy Adams, with these words as he is about to set out to accompany his father, John Adams, on his trip to France to become the American minister named to negotiate treaties of peace and commerce with Great Britain. Like the family of William James, the Adams family was to become crucial in shaping the life of their nation, though in different eras and in different ways. She writes It will be expected of you, my son, that as you are favored with superior advantages under the instructive eye of a tender parent, that your improvements should bear some proportion to your advantages …These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm life, or the repose of pacific station, that great
C. W. Hart (&) Public, Health, Medicine, and Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College, Box 167, 1300 York Avenue, New York, NY 10021, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
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characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman. (McCullough 2001, John Adams, p. 226) Were the words ‘‘novelist, man of letters, philosopher, and psychologist’’ substituted for ‘‘hero and statesman’’ one can imagine the collective voice of the James family speaking to the five children of Mary Robertson Walsh James and Henry James, Sr., particularly their two eldest sons William (1842–1910) and Henry (1843–1916). Indeed, to come to grips in any small way with William James requires an encounter with the collective voice and combined presence of the James family upon him and his siblings. Like the Adams family, the Jameses, too, wrote letters to one another. They wrote in often revealing ways about hopes, fears, aspirations, health problems, the social scene, political and artistic endeavors, and, most of all, themselves. And like the Adams family the Jameses became what would be called religious ‘‘free thinkers.’’ They contended with an Irish and Presbyterian heritage. In the face of their historic affiliation and common bonds with Calvinism, the Adams clan became Unitarians while the James family became, for lack of a better term, ‘‘religious eclectics.’’ The Jameses were travelers geographically throughout their individual and collective lives. And William James himself became a ‘‘traveler’’ both spiritually and vocationally. Plotting the course of the journey that led William James to write The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902 is a complicated matter. Among the many issues animating the Gifford Lectures (the source of the composition of The Varieties) is his wish to separate what he describes as ‘‘second hand religious life, that is, one shaped by imitation, tradition, and habit’’ from ‘‘the original experiences which were the pattern-setters for all the mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.’’(James, p. xiv) James elaborates further Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences, of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what they consider divine. (James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 39) Put another way, what James pursues in The Varieties is an empirically verifiable (as far as that is possible) set of descriptions and categories of what is real, authentic, and demonstrable in a person’s religious experience and self-understanding. William James would himself become a ‘‘pattern-setter’’ for others in the establishment of the study of the psychology of religion: Edwin Starbuck, James Henry Leuba, George Albert Coe, and Anton Boisen. These persons were either James’ contemporaries or those whose work followed his in the earlier part of the twentieth century. The legacy of William James’ masterwork continues to stimulate debate among religious progressives, happy and unhappy seekers outside or within formal religious communities and denominations, and evangelicals who divide over and align with James along the fault lines of the ongoing fundamentalist-modernist debate. James’ use of autobiography and biography has become a staple of theological education and discourse. The Varieties of Religious Experience provided for James a singular opportunity to address academic and personal issues that had pursued him for years including ‘‘unfinished business’’ with his father, Henry, Sr. This he did while struggling with illness and mortality in what was the last decade of his life.
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William James and the James Family William James was born on January 11, 1842, in New York City and died on August 26, 1910, in Chocura, New Hampshire. His recent (2006) biographer, Robert D. Richardson, views him as a bridge figure between the intellectual life and social milieu of midnineteenth century America and the evolving Modernist movement in Europe in the early twentieth century. Through Henry James, Sr., the family was exposed on a regular basis to virtually all of the leading figures of American intellectual life in a period that has been called by F.O. Matthiessen and others the ‘‘American Renaissance.’’ Those connected with the James family and Henry, Sr., in particular, include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Allcott. William’s early life was grounded in these and other associations in a web of relationships that grew over time to include such individuals as Theodore Flournoy, Alfred North Whitehead, and Sigmund Freud whom he met at the time of Freud’s only visit to America at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1909. The James family was heir to a considerable fortune that was accumulated through the prodigious entrepreneurial efforts of Henry, Sr.’s father and William’s namesake, ‘‘William of Albany’’ or ‘‘Old Billy’’ as he was variously called. ‘‘Old Billy’’ was a Presbyterian immigrant from Ireland. He was one part of the James family’s Scotch Irish and Protestant heritage. The other part of this heritage came through their mother’s side. Her maiden name was Mary Robertson Walsh. ‘‘Old Billy’’ left an amount of three million dollars to his heirs at the time of his death in 1852. Henry, Sr., had in a number of ways a problematic life. He suffered an injury while a youngster resulting in the amputation of one of his legs. He entered but never completed a course of study at either Union College or Princeton Theological Seminary. He was, however, in part because of his considerable inheritance and because of his native gifts, able to pursue his wide-ranging philosophical and theological interests. These efforts resulted in his writing a number of books and numerous lectures and engaging in extensive conversation and correspondence with a set of luminaries both in America and abroad. As an example, one of his writings emphasized an allegorical rather than a strict ‘‘creationist’’ reading of Genesis. Henry James, Sr., was also drawn to the life and thought of Charles Sandeman, an anti-clerical Calvinist, whose theology he rejected but whose concept of a loving brotherhood of man and the value of the common sharing of goods he found sympathetic to his own views. These utopian and egalitarian ideals found additional reinforcement for Henry, Sr., via the writings of Charles Fourier. Fourier’s ideas inspired the Brook Farm experiment in communal living that is artistically rendered in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. The major figure in Henry, Sr.’s intellectual life, along with Emerson, was Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Swedenborg’s mystical writings inspired Henry in many ways. Most particularly Swedenborg influenced Henry’s belief in the need for freedom from an oppressive self-regard that he (Henry) viewed as the most destructive force in nature. In its place he sought oneness with a mystical realm. He was not alone. As historian of American religion Sydney Ahlstrom notes Swedenborg’s influence was seen everywhere; in Transcendentalism and at Brook Farm, in spiritualism and the free love movement, in the craze for communitarian experiment, in faith healing, in mesmerism, and a half-dozen medical cults; among great intellectuals, crude charlatans, and innumerable frontier quacks. (R.W.B. Lewis 1991, The Jameses: A Family Narrative, p. 54)
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As was his pattern, Henry came to reject the institutional representation of the Swedenborigan church even as he embraced its call for renunciation of individual selfhood and its seeking after transpersonal states and an otherworldly reality. Henry also came to experience in 1844 something he called, following Swedenborg, his ‘‘vastation.’’ It immobilized him into a state of inner turmoil and exhaustion the likes of which he was never to experience again in his life. His description of this condition of vastation encompasses aspects of depression and panic and at the same time reflects Kierkegaard’s understanding of ‘‘despair as the sickness unto death’’ and the ‘‘dark night of the soul’’ described in the Catholic mystical literature of St. John of the Cross and others. It is very similar to what William himself would describe later in The Varieties of Religious Experience as ‘‘the sick soul.’’ It is worthy of note that William, too, went through his own vastation in 1870 that is described in a thinly disguised form in The Varieties. For both father and son their vastations represented in Paul Tillich’s phrase a ‘‘shaking of the foundations’’ leading in William’s case over time to a surer sense of vocation and the start of a steady climb to a productive adult life. Henry, Sr., was a restless man who never seemed to find extended peace or contentment in his life. He subjected (the only word for it) his family to a series of moves during his children’s growing up years that took them from New York to Europe to Newport to Boston crisscrossing the Atlantic frequently. He claimed to be in search of finding the ideal way to educate his children and yet never seemed to be satisfied with any place for very long. He published numerous tomes throughout his life. It was left to William, his dutiful eldest son, to edit his father’s work as The Literary Remains of Henry James published in 1884. William James, as previously noted, was the eldest of the five James children and was born in 1842. Henry, the great novelist and man of letters, followed in 1843. There were two other younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky; 1845–1883) named for a Swedenborigan colleague of Henry, Sr., and Robertson (Bob; 1846–1910). The two youngest sons served in the Civil War though William and Henry did not. Wilky was severely wounded at the attack on Fort Wagner in 1863, the battle commemorated in the famous monument on the Boston Common memorializing Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th. William James, in fact, gave an address at the time of the dedication of the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens’ famous creation in 1897. The one girl in the family, Alice, was born in 1848 and died in 1892. It was she who came closest to the literary and analytical gifts of the two oldest James children. In spite of her invalidism and serial nervous collapses, she wrote brilliant diary entries and letters whose content and style stand the test of time. William had a history of a series of vocational efforts and false starts. He studied painting with William Morris Hunt in Newport, and in spite of what appears to be real talent he desisted in the endeavor in part because of his father’s disapproval. He then attended the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard followed by the Harvard Medical School where he received his only earned degree, an M.D., in 1869. He never practiced medicine but by then had become immersed in the scientific method. He went on to teach both physiology and psychology at Harvard under the watchful eye of its then president Charles William Eliot. A key point in James’ extended formative period came in 1872 where he met for nine months in Cambridge with Charles Sanders Pierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Chauncey Wright in what came to be called the Metaphysical Club. These meetings proved to be a prime source for spirited discourse and reflection that grew over time into what would be called ‘‘pragmatism’’ (a term James himself coined). Pragmatism would become a school of thought that would dominate American philosophy and intellectual life for the first third of the twentieth century.
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In 1876 Henry married Alice Howe Gibbens and spent the next three decades in a very full career. They had four children. In 1877 he met philosopher Josiah Royce whose idealist and neo-Hegelian framework differed drastically from James’ own empiricism. He also came to incorporate ideas and insight from French philosopher Charles Renouvier that emphasized the role of freedom of choice and action. During these years James produced a series of classics including the two volumes of Principles of Psychology in 1890 and The Will to Believe in 1896. He was then offered an invitation to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion at Edinburgh that would become The Varieties of Religious Experience. His written work includes a voluminous correspondence that along with his other writing, teaching, and lecturing contributed significantly to an understanding of the mind with its functions, its needs, and its potential. Throughout his life and work James became and remained a radical empiricist. He upheld and never relinquished his belief in experience as a reliable guide in the search for truth. It is crucial to note in any discussion of James’ study of psychology and psychology of religion his reliance upon an empirical and pragmatic approach. Pragmatism viewed means and ends as interdependent. And in pragmatism knowledge is social, relational, and dependent on the ‘‘flow,’’ an important Jamesian word. Flow connotes a connection of ideas, sensations, and interactions between the interior self and any larger, this worldly reality. James famously described the world as a ‘‘big blooming buzzing confusion’’ upon which we place form and meaning. In this context, it is also important to note that James was the originator of the phrase ‘‘stream of consciousness.’’ Indeed, it would be hard to imagine the contemporary dialogue between psychology and religion without James’ contributions. There the emphasis on narrative and process can be traced to James and his often invisible influence. Indeed, pastoral counseling, pastoral supervision, and pastoral care would be significantly diminished without his concepts of ‘‘time line,’’ ‘‘pluralism,’’ and ‘‘healthy mindedness’’ as conceptual tools and perspectives to enlighten the search for meaning. Before turning directly to The Varieties it would be well to pause and reflect upon why James managed to be such a success. In spite of a collection of psychosomatic problems and cardiac disease, a continuing subdued rivalry with his brother Henry, an inclination to depression, the weight of being the eldest son of a troubled and eccentric father, and finding himself subjected to an intense and protracted struggle for autonomy and identity, William James flourished. Why was that? Several points come to mind. The first certainly has to do with his native endowments, and multiple gifts and talents artistic, literary, and scientific. Second, he had the time and resources to find what he was looking for. He was able to avoid the trauma of service in the carnage of the Civil War. His wife, Alice, loved him and put up with him. He had a university president, Charles William Eliot, who gave him both opportunities and time off when in the face of exhaustion he obviously needed it. He lived at the right time when the intellectual ferment involved in the development of a scientific psychology made possible his theoretical advances. He was temperamentally a fundamentally generous and self-effacing person. And he also belonged to the James family that while demanding, complicated, and given to melancholy remained devoted to him and he to them. It would be all too easy to apply terms like ‘‘enmeshment’’ or ‘‘symbiosis’’ without acknowledging the other James family contribution to him and to each other. All these factors taken together have much to do with what propelled William James forward to write The Varieties of Religious Experience in what was to be the last decade of his life.
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The Varieties of Religious Experience William James received his invitation to deliver the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion at Edinburgh in April of 1897. He had to postpone their presentation until 1899–1901 due to complications of a heart ailment and general exhaustion. They represented not only the culmination of much of his work to date but also were, as he said, an opportunity to address concerns that had been of deep interest to him for some time. The drive to go forward to deliver the Gifford Lectures must be seen, as already noted, in the context of his heart ailment that was exacerbated during a holiday in 1898 in the Adirondacks when he over exerted himself while hiking, a pastime he thoroughly enjoyed in a setting that he found exhilarating. It may be that the damage done at the time (described briefly in one source as a ‘‘valvular lesion’’) could have been repaired with current therapies or surgery. In James’ case, he had to live with its debilitating consequences. Also crucial for understanding the immediate context for the writing and delivering of the Gifford Lectures was an event that came at the same time he sustained his heart injury. This also happened while James and friends were in the Adirondacks. He experienced one evening a moment of stark enlightenment, a reverie or an epiphany, which he described with these words written to his wife, Alice The streaming moonlight lit up things in a magical checkered play, and it seemed as if the God of all nature mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life. The two kinds of Gods have nothing in common … the human remoteness of the inner life, and yet the intense appeal of it, its everlasting freshness and its mercurial decay … all whirled about inextricably together. (Lewis 1991, The Jameses, p. 500–501) From this event forward James knew he was ready to make the step of writing the Gifford Lectures. He would then in an altogether public way and under intense scrutiny come to construct a synthesis regarding mind, faith, belief, and action of the sort that Henry, Sr., was never able to make for himself. Henry, Sr., throughout his life struggled mightily with the task of finding cohesion and meaning in the philosophical and theological realms. He never brought his wide-ranging interests and diligent efforts into the full-scale order he might have desired. It would be William’s fate and opportunity to forge in his life and writing lasting contributions to both psychology and philosophy. And as he wrote and presented the Gifford Lectures he did so while confronting the specter of his own mortality. The Varieties of Religious Experience thus represents a tour de force created under the dual pressures of illness and the James family legacy. A few words should be said about title of the Gifford Lectures having to do with ‘‘Natural Religion.’’ The term ‘‘natural religion’’ denotes that revelation of the divine is primarily related to human experience that looks to the sacred within. ‘‘Revealed religion,’’ on the other hand, locates truth in sacred texts (e.g., the Bible), tradition, and dogmatics. Both ‘‘revealed religion’’ and ‘‘natural religion’’ by this time acknowledged the Higher Criticism and remained open to scholarly interpretation and elaboration. Both stood on the modernist side of the fundamentalist-modernist debate. Once more a James (in this case William) was about to pile wood on the fire of controversy between biblical literalism and liberal religion that continues to burn more than a century after the Gifford Lectures. The Varieties of Religious Experience is organized into two sets of lectures of ten each and the book is dedicated to ‘‘E.P.G. In Filial Gratitude and Love.’’ E.P.G. is a reference to his wife’s mother, Elizabeth Gibbens, who was a devotee of ‘‘mind cure’’ as a source of healing and whom he felt understood his ‘‘soul sickness.’’ The Varieties’ topics are vast
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and indeed do what the subtitle suggests in that they are ‘‘A Study in Human Nature.’’ James decries reductionism of any sort from all quarters including philosophy and science. As an empiricist, he respects both and yet at the same time notes their limitations in getting at the sort of experiential truth he seeks to describe. It is important to say a bit about what The Varieties is not as well as to say why it has value before surveying some of its content and offering a brief critique. The English critic and historian A. N. Wilson (who discloses he is a ‘‘James maniac’’) provides this useful summary James does not want to use God or the religious hypothesis to give ‘‘an explanation of the world.’’ He is perfectly happy for science to do its job, and he does not want God to be brought in as lazy short-hand for what we either cannot, or cannot be bothered to, explain about the material universe. The ‘something more’ is something more. If you have never felt the need of it, or have no experience of what James is talking about, or if there is nothing in you as there was in James, which makes response when such questions are aired, then they are of no more than historical interest. … James was trying to rescue, and assert the legitimacy of, an all-butuniversal though infinitely varied set of human experiences. It is, he contended, these experiences which led to the growth of organized religion and theologies; not the other way about. (Wilson 1999, God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith and Doubt in Western Civilization, p. 332) The value of James’ work has to do, among other things, with serving as a key source for analysis of religious experience and for interdisciplinary work among psychology, religious studies, anthropology, theology, and philosophy. Second, it has had considerable impact on those struggling with addiction; most notably William Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, names The Varieties as a critical source of enlightenment for him as he began the transformative process of his recovery. And James’ study provides a number of terms (e.g., ‘‘sick soul,’’ ‘‘twice born,’’ and ‘‘healthy minded’’) that are descriptively useful but have not been clearly or consistently identified with him in spite of their having shaped cultural, religious, therapeutic, and academic discourse. It is the content of The Varieties of Religious Experience that fixes its place among the realm of the classics. He explores in these two sets of lectures such topics as ‘‘Mysticism,’’ ‘‘Saintliness,’’ ‘‘Conversion’’ (two lectures), and the relation of ‘‘Philosophy’’ and ‘‘Neurology’’ to religion. James takes on a perspective that places primary emphasis on what happens, what a person goes through, and what are her feelings in response to historical events, texts, persons, and life crises. He believes that overall his empirical and pluralistic approach makes the most common sense. In The Varieties he sees one form of religious experience as that of what he terms ‘‘healthy mindedness.’’ It emphasizes human capacities for happiness and self-confidence. These qualities are evident for him in the persons of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson and in Protestant liberal theology in general. The experience of the ‘‘sick soul,’’ on the other hand, identifies an inclination to melancholy and to see human nature as deeply flawed and in need of assistance. Examples of the ‘‘sick soul’’ are John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, and, in a disguised form, James himself all of whom at some point demonstrated a troubled or unhappy response to life. James also articulates how the ‘‘healthy minded’’ and the ‘‘sick soul’’ represent characters that are either ‘‘once born’’ (optimistic, confident, determined) or in need of becoming ‘‘twice born’’ in order to be renewed, reinvigorated, or restored to a transformed state of wholeness. Moreover, becoming ‘‘twice born,’’ James insisted, is rooted in unconscious processes in the mind.
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Several justifiable criticisms have been leveled at The Varieties of Religious Experience. The book is marked by a de-contextualized and a-historical frame of reference. Historical figures make appearances without commentary regarding what constitutes the historical circumstances which may have contributed to their encounters with religious experience. He shows less or little sympathy for the experience of Roman Catholic figures mentioned in the book thus displaying perhaps an attitude common to the era of Protestant hegemony in America at the times the lectures were written. And reviewers at the time and since, notably G. Stanley Hall, have been critical of what they saw as James’ abandonment of experimental, positivist science as a way of testing and verifying his hypotheses about various categories and descriptions of religious experience. In short, James has been accused of abandoning the scientific method thus losing an opportunity to ground his ideas in something more than biography and autobiography. So what category of religious experience best describes William James himself? Was he ‘‘healthy minded’’ or a ‘‘sick soul’’? Biographical evidence seems to indicate he was both but not at the same time. Weighted down with fear and anguish, he progressed through a period of deep doubt and search for identity and purpose with the sort of suffering that qualifies him as a ‘‘sick soul.’’ As he moved forward in life from about 1870, he gradually became filled with more confidence and greater satisfaction that were in turn shared with his family, students, and professional colleagues. He had transcended and moved beyond the anxiety, self-doubt, and inhibitions of the morbidly self-absorbed adolescent and young man he had once been. James may be viewed as one who was among the ‘‘twice born’’ by virtue of his having developed a disposition of ‘‘healthy mindedness’’ marked by an unending curiosity and a zest for exploration as he matured. He lived a rich and full adult life. James died in August of 1910 at his beloved home in Chocura, New Hampshire of complications related to his heart condition. He was 68 years old at the time.
Epilogue In her recent (2008) book The Cure Within: A History of Mind–Body Medicine historian of science Anne Harrington concludes her study with these words of reflection Mind–body medicine is a deeply storied world. I have reviewed the historical emergence of the narrative templates that have given rise to the major classes of living stories we see around us today. I have explored the ways in which these different kinds of stories both claim the authority of science and medicine … and function as carriers of moral, religious, and existential levels of meaning … Quite literally these stories belong to all of us … it seems clear to me that the future of mind–body medicine should lie in its seeking, not finally escape from its stories, but it embraces them as part of its map and part of its territory alike—inextricably part of, and fundamental to, what it is all about. (Harrington, The Cure Within, p. 255) The story of mind–body healing that Harrington tells is laid out in broad but well-defined categories (e.g., ‘‘The Body That Speaks,’’ ‘‘The Power of Positive Thinking’’) that both evidence and invite careful personal reflection and historical analysis. The process and structure of her study broadly mirror the approach of James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience where personal and historical narratives also serve as the prime source of material for the discourse. I have a colleague, a college classmate in fact, who entered the priesthood as a third career. She has a thriving parish church that she has seen through what she describes as
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infancy, latency, and a rambunctious adolescence so that now she can afford to relax just a bit. At our last meeting she sagely reminded me that ‘‘a lot of times people just don’t get a chance to tell their stories and really be heard … it is something we [meaning clergy and, I would probably add, other helping professionals] do all the time and take for granted.’’ If Anne Harrington and my colleague are in any way correct, then William James got it right—really right—in relation to stories and their place in the quest for meaning. He heard them, read them, remembered them, wrote them down, compared them, analyzed them, and categorized them in ways that made them count for something. For this reason alone, William James and his legacy continue to instruct us and demand our attention. References Capps, D. (1997). Men, religion, and melancholia: James. Otto, Jung, and Erikson. New Haven and London: Yale. Harrington, A. (2008). The cure within: A history of mind–body medicine. New York: Norton. James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics. Lehrer, J. (2007). Proust was a neuroscientist. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Lewis, R. W. B. (1955). The American Adam: Innocence, tragedy, and tradition in the nineteenth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, R. W. B. (1991). The Jameses: A family narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. McCullough, D. (2001). John Adams. New York: Simon and Schuster. Menand, L. (2001). The metaphysical club: A story of ideas in America. New York: Farrar Straus, and Giroux. Richardson, R. D. (2006). William James: In the maelstrom of American modernism. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Stuhr, J. J. (Ed.). (2000). Pragmatism and classical American philosophy (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press: New York and Oxford. Wilson, A. N. (1999). God’s funeral: A biography of faith and doubt in western civilization. New York: Ballantine Books.
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