Something is phenomenologically fascinating about the experience of fear and anxiety. Fear, in all its forms, has a powerful place in our psychology, and that power can turn fretful angst and mere worry into consuming terror. We can also transmute our fears into objects to be managed through phenomenological and psychological analysis. Dealing with them and how we think about things, rather than allowing fear and worry to become a consuming and unreflective thing that controls the character of how we think and act. This paper recasts the role of anxiety and fear by phenomenologically examining the multifaceted aspect of intentionality contained within an anxious and fearful experience. By moving away from the raw, qualia-based, biological, and fundamental conceptions, this approach uncovers knowledge of our intentional stance toward the world that otherwise gets caught in typical psychological responses of fight or flight. I borrow methodologies from well-known phenomenological sources and illuminate how anxiety and fear interact with our beliefs, desires, and knowledge.

In order to characterize religious conversion there must be a preexisting conception of the nature of religion. The conception of religion will then determine what conversion is. That there is no agreed upon definition of religion will not impact the argument, as we explain below. We use, as an example an account of religion due to (Woodberry and Smith) which understands religion as a system of belief, behavior, and belonging. This theoretical structure implies conversion must transform someone in all three ways. We show how standard accounts of phenomenological transformation are all incomplete and do not account for the full or variegated nature of religious expression.

To motivate this conceptual analysis, we will provide some of these previously mentioned historical examples that purport to describe religious conversion; in particular, the wager offered by Blaise Pascal, and the crypto-conversions of the Marranos. We suggest that these cases do not provide adequate accounts of the phenomenon of spiritual conversion. From there, we end. Either conversion does not happen, or one must adjust their theory of religion and ontology accordingly to adequately characterize the conversion phenomenon.