Hmm …

… Review of Ronald Dworkin, 'Religion Without God' | Inside Higher Ed. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“Numinous” is the term Rudolf Otto coined in The Idea of the Holy (1917) to name an overwhelming experience of the grandeur, power, order, significance, and strangeness (“otherness”) of the universe, or of being itself. It can be blissful, and it can be terrifying.

But the numinous as understood by Otto and those he visited to arrive at the term includes a component of personality. It is, fundamentally, the experience of reality, not as a thing or a process, but as imbued with the presence of an Other through it and with it and in it.