Religion and life …

…William James' 'Varieties of Religious Experience': Human Nature and the Fruits of Faith - WSJ. (?Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In his Gifford Lectures, James decided to exclude religious institutions or religion in its institutional settings. He chose not to argue, or even discuss, theology. He set aside the question of immortality, which he wrote about elsewhere in an essay called "Human Immortality" (1897), where he concluded that it would be "blindness" to rule it out as a possibility. He concentrated instead on the effect of religion on the individual, of its stirrings in the human heart.