“Everything That Really Matters”: Social Suffering, Subjectivity, and the Remaking of Human Experience in a Disordering World

When William James launched into the Gifford Lectures of 1901, he admitted to his Edinburgh audience a certain feeling of trepidation. Those lectures, which he would later publish as The Varieties of Religious Experience , evoked in James a sense of consternation because, as he remarked on the occasion, he was neither a theologian, nor a historian of religion, nor an anthropologist. “Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed,” James pleaded.