Hearing Voices, Interpreting Words

In this commentary I will be exploring a number of implications that McCauley and Graham’s theses about the interrelationship of normal, religious, and mentally disordered cognition have for an interpretative methodology that has been fruitfully utilized by empirically-oriented scholars of religion. I argue that that methodology imposes some important constraints on the type of theorizing McCauley and Graham propose, and that their findings in turn suggest some important modifications to that methodology.