Can experience be properly categorized in the academic study of religion? Can the meaning of an experience be determined and/or meaning derived? Basically, what is the definition of religious experience? These supporting actors serve to support the overarching question: how can and/or can we properly study the concept of religious experience? This article includes conversations by two people engaged in this fundamental concern, Robert Sharf1 and Matthew Kapstein, on the study of religious experience. Sharf argues that religious experiences are personal, inner-centered, non-discursive and/or non-conceptual mystical experiences that point to the study of religious experience. not towards a distinctly numinous inner world but rather towards themselves. (Sharf, 114.) As such, these experiences should be relegated to the realm of the ineffable. From a phenomenological perspective, religious experiences are subjective mental events occurring in the intangible substrate of the human mind that escape public scrutiny. (Sharf, 104.) He is skeptical of a person's ability to study that which is ineffable and to derive meaning from that which cannot be categorized or presented in discourse. Kapstein refutes this claim by using an aesthetic analogy of the "beauty of music" to explain that "our aesthetic responses are not merely subjective [but] they are intersubjective." (Kapstein, 273.) Communication with each other and apprehension by others are valued properties of religious experiences. From there, there is a shared language between these participants and the purely subjective perspective is abandoned. It is interesting to note that this intersubjectivity is individualized (or rather personalized) within particular cultures in a microscopic perspective, while... middle of paper ......ity, is the experience not not then effable? Perhaps it could be argued that Augustine's experience lies in the realm of the unique and constitutes an exception to religiously mystical experience. I am certain that this religious experience can be properly categorized, studied and valued from its text - in other words, yes, it can be (and has been for over 1,600 years) brought to the academic table for study . The presence of light: divine radiance and religious experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. “Experience.” In critical terms for religious studies. The University of Chicago Press, 1998. http://proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=http://www.credoreference.com/entry/uchicagors/experience.Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo., and Henry Chadwick. Confessions. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.