The Varieties of Religious Experience
James, the founder of pragmatism and a brilliant psychologist, turned the same empirical tools used on nature toward the study of religious experience: mysticism, conversion, saintliness, sick souls and healthy minds. He concluded that religious experience is real in its effects, regardless of its ultimate truth. The most open-minded, rigorous book ever written about faith.
Lectures, and they read like it. James quotes conversion testimonies at numbing length, and his definition of religion (the solitary individual in private experience) simply excludes ritual, community, and institution, which is most of religion. The psychology is a century stale. You come for the framework and wade through pages of Victorian invalids describing their nerves.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
