The book explores religious experience as a justifiable reason for religious belief, demonstrating that the three pillars of Critical Realism - ontological intransitivity, epistemic relativity and judgemental rationality - can be applied to religion.

Margaret S Archer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Her previous books include Culture and Agency, Realist Social Theory, Being Human and Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation.
Andrew Collier is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and has previously lectured at Warwick, Sussex and Bangor Universities. His recent publications include Being and Worth, which extends realism to ethics, and Christianity and Marxism, which aims to reconcile these two world views.

Foreword Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas Porpora 1. Introduction Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas Porpora 2. What Do We Mean by God? Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas Porpora 3. Realism, Relativism and Reason in Religious Belief Andrew Collier 4. Judgemental Rationality and Jesus Douglas Porpora 5. Models of Man: The admission of transcendence Margaret Archer 6. The Masters of Suspicion and Secularisation Andrew Collier 7. Western Mysticism and the Limits of Language: Beyond language Margaret Archer 8. A Propadeutic to a Propadeutic: On inter-faith dialogue Douglas Porpora 9. Natural Theology, Revealed Theology and Religious Experience Andrew Collier 10. On Understanding Religious Experience: St Teresa as a challenge to scoial theory Margaret Archer 11. The Human Project Douglas Porpora 12. Emancipation, Social and Spiritual Andrew Collier