Mourning, Melancholia, and Mania: Considering the Religious Therapy of William James

William James was a religious philosopher and psychologist who both inspired and directly influenced prominent intellectuals such as Hans Joas, Wouter Kusters, Charles Taylor, and Miguel de Unamuno, et al. James says that consideration of the value of an experience should be separated from the way that the experience is classified. This leads one to consider that states of madness, melancholia, and mania, for example, should not be dismissed as merely pathological symptoms. In this panel, we consider James and his legacy, and try to answer the question of whether seemingly pathological states are not only possible sources of religious truth, but rather provide more probable evidence of religious truth than non-pathological states do.