Radio Mind: Protestant Experimentalists on the Frontiers of Healing

In conversation with recent scholarly approaches to the interrelationships of religion, media, and technology, this paper analyzes a neglected form of metaphysical religion within the rubric of Protestant experimentalism. The main sources are a group of early twentiethcentury Anglican clerics with shared interests in telepathy, psychic research, psychology, and healing. The paper argues for attention to the "sensational forms" (or paths of transmission) through which these clerics understood divine–human communication to occur. Analyzing divine vibration, telepathy, and psychic energy as Protestant sensational forms has allowed me to set my analysis of experimentalist healing within intersecting historical contexts, including competing theological imaginations, new communication technologies, discourses of scientific authority, and cultural exchange on colonial frontiers.