Bookedited by Alasdair Coles, Joanna Collicutt.
Summary: This innovative book examines what can be learnt about the brain mechanisms underlying religious belief and practice from studying people with neurological disorders, such as stroke, epilepsy and Parkinson's disease. Using a clinical case study approach, the book analyses the interaction of social influences, religious upbringing and neurological disorders on lived religious experience in a number of different religions. The interdisciplinary contributors to the book ensure a variety of perspectives to help understand how the religious life is affected when different cognitive functions are impaired; how faith modifies the effects of neurological disorders; and how awareness of faith practices may assist in the treatment of these conditions.
Contents:
The discipline of neurology / Alasdair Coles
The scientific study of religion / Joanna Collicutt
Methodological hazards in the neuroscientific study of religion / Stuart Judge
Embodied cognition and the neurology of religion / Warren Brown
Phenomenology, neurology, psychiatry, and religious commitment / Ian Kidd
Philosophical hazards in the neuroscientific study of religion / Daniel de Haan
The glass onion / Sophie Grace Chappell
Towards an Islamic neuropsychiatry : a classification of the diseases of the head in ʻAlī ibn Sahl Rabbān al-Ṭabarī's Paradise of wisdom / Neil Krishan Aggarwal
Temporal lobe epilepsy, Dostoyevsky and irrational significance / Alasdair Coles
Parkinson's Disease, religious belief and spirituality / Roger Barker and Clare Redfern
Beyond reasonable doubt : cognitive and neuropsychological implications for religious disbelief / Gordon Pennycook, Daniel Tranel, Kelsey Warner and Erik Asp
Ramadam fasting and neurologic disorders / Ashraf El-Mitwalli
Autism and the panoply of religious belief, disbelief and experience / Kelly Clark and Ingela Visuri
Personhood and religion in people with dementia / Julian Hughes
Religion and frontotemporal dementia / Nicolas Block and Bruce Miller
Religion and spirituality in neuro-rehabilitation : a case study / Joanna Collicut
Eastern spirituality, mind-body practices and neuro-rehabilitation / Giles Yeates
Examining the continuum of life to determine death : a Jewish perspective / Aron Buchman
Near-death and out-of-body experiences : a case for dialogue between scientist and theologian? / Michael Marsh.