RELIGION [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS] Winston King's entry in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion states well one classic position in religious studies: religion results from a particular kind of experience, which King calls "depth-awareness." Even at the time the encyclopedia first appeared, that position was fiercely contested. Indeed, certain characteristic fault lines run through King's account: the difficulty of denoting religious experience in a way that is not obscure ("depth-awareness") or circular ("religious experience is religious precisely because it occurs in a religious context"), for example, and the presence of two different treatments of experience—one in "Definitions" and "Distinguishing Characteristics of Religious Experience," the other in "The Sacred Experience"—separated from one another as far as possible, perhaps in order to hide the repetition.

Alternatives to this position were certainly available at the time. They included Melford Spiro's treatment of religion as...