This book reflects on the implications of neurobiology and the scientific worldview on aspects of religious experience, belief, and practice, focusing especially on the body and the construction of religious meaning.

. Certain properties of the body and emotions facilitate the transmission of religious knowledge and the development of religious states through particular qualities of perception and memory. The body, which is the ground of religious experience, can be understood as transformative: the characteristic that recalled emotion is “refelt” in the present enables emotion to be cultivated or developed. Emotions and the stimuli that evoke them are necessarily culturally specific, but the automatic nature of this process is universal. Religious traditions have (...) made use of these processes to educate the feeling toward certain qualities and to develop religious experience, through the use of sacred images, ritual posture and gesture, and repetition of ritual acts. Neuroscience contributes to our understanding of the emotional processes that take place when emotions are evoked, refelt, and developed; the neurobiological processing of emotion parallels experience. Keeping experience central makes it possible to bring religion and neuroscience together in a nonreductive examination of spiritual experience. (shrink)

Form and content give rise to the question of function in the Saletta delle Dame of the Palazzo Salvadego. It is a uniquely decorated space in which frescos cover the four walls, treating the viewer to an all-round vista of the countryside. Mediating between illusion and reality are eight life-size depictions of women in contemporary dress, whom, set in pairs behind a fictive balustrade, focus their attention towards the centre of the room. In the vaulted ceiling are painted musical instruments, (...) suggesting a possible use for this space. The decorative effect is unlike any other room from this period. This chapter explores the imagery of the Saletta and considers its function within the broader context of frescoed Italian Renaissance rooms. (shrink)