Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age

Review\nForeword Reviews
“Scholarly and accessible, Encountering Mystery dares to address spiritual phenomena that many experience, but that few are willing to discuss. It opens for consideration the many ways that the divine intervenes in the lives of ordinary people.”\nPublishers Weekly
“A grounded entry in the supernatural encounters genre, this well-researched chronicle has the power to give skeptics second thoughts.”\n“A marvelously daring book, Encountering Mystery brims over with cogent rational arguments and powerful narratives that challenge the dominant materialist worldview of our day and age. Dale Allison brings transcendence back into religion eloquently, and in the process offers readers abundant hope and ample reason for believing in the central promises of the Christian faith.”
— Carlos Eire
author of Waiting for Snow in Havana and Learning to Die in Miami\n“Steeped in transparency and infused with a lifetime of world-class scholarship, Dale Allison has written a book that truly needed to be written, and that few others could have. He has gifted us all with a spiritually personal and pastoral exploration of the power of extraordinary religious experiences in shaping and defining the nature of faith. In my estimation, Encountering Mystery will join other such works in putting to rest any notion that God’s creation is limited to what we normally perceive.”
— Peter Enns
author of How the Bible Actually Works\n“Dale Allison offers lovely, theologically informed reflections on how mystical moments, epiphanies, visions, prophetic dreams, and other surprising encounters leave us changed—those of us who experience them directly and those of us who hear about them from others we trust. What we ‘make of’ these experiences, how the church has handled them, the ways they challenge pastors and other people of faith are timely matters to consider. We may, as Allison says, live in a secular age, but more and more of these stories surface as we open hospitable space for them and allow ourselves to be humbled and surprised by the joy they so often bring to us who are finding our way together on this ‘darkling plain.’”
— Marilyn McEntyre
author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies and Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict\n“If you need proof that the acts of God in the world or epiphanies are not relegated to the history of Israel in the Old Testament or the exploits of the apostles in the New Testament, this book is a must-read. In Encountering Mystery, Allison draws on his own experiences as well as that of numerous others who can testify to what can only be accounted for in Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Make no mistake, these are not a bunch of uncritically engaged idle tales, for Allison has pondered all the possibilities attached to the assumed subjectivity of such events and can attest to what those who know, know: you cannot ‘unknow’ what you know without damage to the psyche. Simply put: the Real is still at work in the everydayness of people’s lives and is literally visiting with common people who will attend to the ways of the Spirit in the world. The stories of encounter in this book demonstrate at every turn, without exception, how God is revealing, empowering, calling all to faith and how all who are believing are seeing. And here is the indisputable part, we all have faith enough. Inspiring and humbling!”
— Esther E. Acolatse
author of Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit: Biblical Realism in Africa and the West\n“Highly respected scholar Dale Allison dares to raise important questions that academic protocol has too often excluded. Many of the case studies he offers will challenge our own presuppositions about the world—whatever they are—and for that reason are all the more important for us to consider. Allison rightly expands the repertoire of experience that studies of religion and Scripture must take into account.”
— Craig S. Keener
author of Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the