Givenness and explanation: A phenomenological response to naturalist accounts in religious studies

This dissertation contributes to ongoing scholarship regarding the phenomenology of religion by engaging it with debates in Religious Studies between naturalist methodologies, which reduce religious experience to social-scientific terms, and descriptive methodologies, which argue religious experience cannot be explained in nonreligious terms lest we lose that which is religious about the experience. I propose that in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, specifically in his phenomenology of revelation, we find a methodology that avoids the reductionism of the naturalist method while still explaining religion in a manner that avoids the apologetics associated with descriptive accounts of religion.