| Human beings have available to them a myriad of resources for making moral decisions. Religious experience is one factor that can be identified as a contributor to the pool of resources for enhancing the process of becoming moral. Yet while any agency of the divine can be said to have this power, the mystically religious experience holds the potential for shaping moral being in a unique way.;The thesis of this dissertation is that the unique potential held by mystically religious experience for moral transformation can be located and described. Both location and description are dependent on the definition of the mystically religious experience. Hence it is defined according to four criteria: a claim by the experiencing subject that it is a mystical or religious experience, an observable effect in the affective and thought processes of the subject, a described ineffability in the content of the experience, and a paradoxical nature of the experience with the specific paradoxes being determined in the context of the subject's life experience.;While the location may be determined by the claim of the subject, the description of the moral capacity of such an experience is determined by the way in which the multiple spheres of an individual's life converge as a part of the experience and become rearranged in the subject's self understanding. To ground the thesis I have chosen two persons, Dorothy Day and Pauli Murray, who claimed to have had religious experiences that conform to the above definition of a mystically religious experience and who also claim to have been changed morally by their experiences. In analyzing their experiences I demonstrate how the multiple spheres of each woman's existence converged and reshaped each woman's self understanding. I further show how these experiences deepened each woman's commitments to the moral goals she had set for herself. To conclude I set this thesis in the contemporary conversations of feminist and ethical theories. |
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