Here's Christopher Hitchens being slightly less pugnacious than usual:
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It’s odd how many academic disciplines grew out of the study of trance or ecstatic states. Now I know what you’re thinking. ‘Bloody hell, Jules is off on ecstasy again’. But hear me out, I promise I won’t be long.
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We all love a bit of ecstasy, don’t we? Not the drug (though that’s a form of ecstatic experience) but, more broadly, those moments of expansion, elation and awe we sometimes feel, when our heart-strings seem to vibrate in harmony with the universe, when the vast, black and empty cosmos seems suddenly to radiate with love. We’re all into that, yeah?
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Around a quarter of the world's two billion Christians now sign up to the Pentecostalist or neo-Pentecostalist belief that God talks to them. That includes some educated people like, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury. How is this possible, in an era of rising education and living standards? Is the world going mental? One social scientist who has looked into the question deeply is Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who brought out an excellent book last year called When God Talks Back.
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I’m going to a Christian festival this weekend. Let me say that again, just to make sure I heard myself properly. I’m going to a Christian festival this weekend. I..I’m doing what?? Believe me, it’s as strange for me as it is for you. The worst part is I think I might actually enjoy it. This is what happens when you research ecstatic experience. Eventually, like Howard Moon among the yetis, you can’t help but join the dance.
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I, like many other people (at least 15% of the adult population and two thirds of all children, according to the latest psychiatric research), have ‘out-of-the-ordinary' or 'psychosis-like experiences’, where I feel connected to an external supernatural force - or God, as I call Him.
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Is it possible to for a professional sports team to put character before external success? I visited Saracens rugby club to find out.
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Imagine, if you will, the scene. The Enlightenment has defeated Religion, and its various champions meet to carve up the vanquished enemy’s territories. Philosophy takes the chair: ‘Right then, settle down everyone. Thank you. Now, let’s see...Religion used to offer ethics and laws.
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For this week's newsletter, I offer you three varieties of ecstasy. First, the historical variety. I interviewed Bernd Bosel, a philosopher and historian of 'enthusiasm', and we discussed how the Enlightenment tried to marginalize and pathologise ecstatic experience. Try a dose of that here.
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As you know, I’ve been researching the Welsh revival of 1904 and, more broadly, the place of ecstasy in modern culture. On Tuesday, I drove to Cwmbran in the south of Wales, where something called the Welsh Outpouring has broken out. I wondered if the Outpouring was the beginning of a new Welsh revival, so off I went to Cwmbran, like a storm-chaser.
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Next week, I’m off to Wales. First, I’m going to Cwmbran, where something is happening called ‘the Welsh Outpouring’. In April, when a young pastor called Richard Taylor was preaching, the congregation felt filled with the Holy Spirit, there were tears, shouts, groans, and this started to happen every evening.
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Laura Marling’s new album, Once I Was An Eagle, is that rare pleasure - an album to which you listen all the way through, and then want to start again at the beginning. There are only one or two albums like that a year, for me at least. Fleet Foxes’ debut album was one such.
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At the moment I'm researching the cultural practices of ecstasy in the 20th century, which has given me the excuse to read some fine books on the history of pop music. The latest is Matthew Collin’s Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, first published way back in 1997 and since updated. It's a bravura piece of historical journalism.
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While I was writing Philosophy for Life, I lived with three friends in a church in North London. We discovered that our land-lady, who we never met, was Sister Bliss, the DJ and one third of the dance supergroup Faithless.
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