William James was a pioneer in the field of the psychology of religion and is most known for his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. The book is a compilation of his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1901, an event that rocked the religious, psychological and intellectual world of its time. His impact has become lasting and extends to related disciplines today.

Each year I teach a class in the Honors College of the University of Missouri entitled “This is Your Brain on Spirituality,” an exploration that includes brain but extends far beyond it. We begin with William James and his phenomenological approach to religious experience. Heavily influenced by pragmatism, he described his scholarly job as one of observing, recording and summarizing the many self-reported spiritual experiences of people. Though today we might define his sample group as too narrow, not broadly inclusive of the many world religions, it was nevertheless bell weather research of the time.

After studying William James the course moves to the neurology of spiritual experience and then concludes with current explorations of the nature of consciousness. All of these later disciplines, whether studies of neurology or the broader area of consciousness, cite James and his method as the sine quo non of all such studies. Consider the way that this recent text on consciousness (Consciousness: An Interdisciplinary Guide. Broadview Press, 2026) links William James to current researchers: ‘Consciousness is what the great nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist, William James, called the ‘stream of thought,’ and what the contemporary philosopher, David Chalmers, calls ‘that amazing movie playing in our heads.'” (xv)

When James began his series of Gifford Lectures it was to a standing room only crowd of the intellectuals of the day, including his medical peers, psychological researchers and scholars of religion. In his introduction he defined his role and perspective. He was not a theologian and would not draw doctrinal conclusions about the phenomena he observed. Nor would he dismiss religious experience as pathological, a point of view shared by many of his colleagues in the psychological sciences. In fact, to those he offered a challenge: You call yourselves [men] of science, but ignore or dismiss the evidence in front of you. You owe it to your subjects and your discipline to take it seriously, whether you personally believe it or not. At the same time James was not a defender of piety. He was not using his research to bolster a religious position as an apologist.

This orientation of objectivity positioned James between two groups that suspected and sometimes attacked him: hard and fast reductionist scientists and devout religious people. His work equally offended both camps. But his insistence on retaining an interstructural position yielded fruit. Today we know that his courage to occupy liminal territory led to discoveries improbable without it. He is now considered a pioneer by many disciplines, including the hard sciences and the humanities.

Discovering a new way forward often requires a willingness to enter the uncertainty of liminal space and search for what may be found there. That positioning may excite the ire of those who stand on the hard and fast banks of their positions. But deep sea creatures are swimming free in open water. They have been there all along, waiting. Like dreams they are, bubbling to the surface.