I discovered religious experience at Harvard Divinity School, in the Sperry lecture hall, sometime in the late 1980s. By that I do not mean to confess that I had a “first religious experience” there; nor do I mean that, somehow through some activity of my own, I laid hold novelly to the notion of “religious experience,” exposing something new to scholarship, some new direction, or some deep, fundamentally new insight. Rather, I mean quite simply that “religious experience,” the idea, the genre for thinking and reflection, came to my attention for the first time in that room in the late 1980s. In retrospect, I must say that it did so momentously, as I have not been able since to expunge it from my habits of thinking.