Building Religions 17: Mysticism, part 1

If you want to see a religion scholar twitch, try using the adjective 'mystical' as a catch-all descriptor for anything vaguely religious. The effect is about the same as you'd get if you asked a physicist to listen to a New Age devotee talk about 'energy.'There's probably even a small crossover population that you could drive into complete fits by putting the two together as 'mystical energies.'

Mysticism, like religion, is a term that's both problematic and necessary. It's necessary because it does seem to describe a category of experiences and practices that appear in many religions. It's problematic because that category is fuzzy enough that authors have to spend a great deal of time explaining and defending the specific definition that they're using before they can go on to talk about the subject.