Citation: Lindahl, Jared, and Travis Chilcott. "Religious Experiences, Transformative Paths and Religious Goals." Religion 41, no. 1 (2011): 79-83. Section of Review Symposium Patrick McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, xvi+301 pp., $85.00 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 521 88958 2 Religious Experiences, Transformative Paths, and Religious Goals Jared Lindahl a1 and Travis Chilcott a ABSTRACT: Though McNamara indicates that his focus is mainly on theistic forms of religious experience common in the West, it is important to consider how his broadly stated thesis might be affected by data from traditions other than those that are the focus of his book. Although he is right to call our attention to the processes through which religious traditions promote and religious practitioners cultivate experiential states, his approach is limited by his non-attributional conceptualization of religious experience as the culmination of one path toward one goal. A more nuanced approach would require attending more closely to 1) the diversity of ‘experiences’ that religious traditions set apart as being of particular importance, 2) the diversity of practices that are prescribed as being efficacious towards the attainment of those experiences, and 3) the dynamic relationship between individual practitioners and authorities of a religious tradition, wherein questions of authenticity arise and experiences are deemed ‘religious’ or not. KEYWORDS: Patrick McNamara, neuroscience, religious experience, path schema a Department of Religious Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3130, USA. E-mail: Lindahl, lindahl@umail.ucsb.edu; Chilcott, tlc@umail.ucsb.edu. 1 Present address: Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, Department of Philosophy, 2101 E. Coliseum Boulevard, Fort Wayne, IN 46805, USA.