Why Religious Literacy Requires Emotional Literacy

The experience of faith in its affective and aesthetic brilliance and profundity captures and moves people to care and serve. Religious literacy must go beyond the knowledge collected in books and must discover why people love and treasure their faith. It not only involves beliefs and acts of piety, but also how one is transformed in one's heart, mind, and body. We use the embodied choice theory of religion to explain that humans combine emotion and choice in their religious lives. We combine this with Randall Collins' work on interaction ritual chains to describe how emotional interactive ritual chains tie humans to each other and to God.