Pneumakinesis and Stephen King

"rebooting" the discussion on paranormal fear

D. W. Staggs

pp. 97-110

in: Amos Yong, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Kirsteen Kim (eds), Interdisciplinary and religio-cultural discourses on a spirit-filled world, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Assessing belief in spirit is an arduous task and fraught with subjectivities on every front. To complicate the matter, the traditional scientific hermeneutic one usually employs (Enlightenment/empiricist thinking) proves somewhat dissatisfactory in spiritual discourse primarily because science seeks to offer naturalistic explanations for what people believe actually lies above and behind nature itself— a reality comprising spirit (defined later). This is what one might call a very "left-brained" approach to investigating what seems to be a more "right-brained" phenomenon. To address this, I propose an aesthetic method of inquiry that more readily reflects the intuitive nature of the subject matter, that is, spirituality, spiritual belief, and one that stems from American cultural consciousness itself—film. This does not necessarily eliminate the problem of encountering subjectivities. Instead, the point is to look at the phenomenon of fearing spirit from the other side of the coin, per se. Stated differently, what might the arts tell us about reasons why people fear spirit that Enlightenment and/or empiricist discourses cannot?