Encountering the Divine: Religious Intelligences in a Catholic Convent

FAIN: FT-278946-21

Anna Insolio Corwin
St. Mary's College of California (Moraga, CA 94575-2715)

Writing an article on how Catholic nuns talk about religious experience.

The proposed research will provide a critical foundation to understanding what religious intelligences are and how they interactively arise. Taking Catholic nuns as its focus, the present project will bring focused analysis to an existing corpus of data gathered in a Catholic convent in the midwestern United States with expert experiencers to ask the following questions: (1) what knowledge, associated outcomes, and community impacts do Catholic nuns associate with religious intelligences (defined here as: the specific knowledge and skills that arise from interaction with the divine) and (2) what are the communicative conditions through which religious intelligences arises and are shared in the convent. By devoting analytic attention to uncovering how religious intelligences arise and are shared in one ethnographic field site, the project will develop a research framework for the investigation of religious intelligence that will be available to be applied to future research.