acknowledge that Sharf makes many legitimate points against the rhetoric of experience, and I appreciate his points that mystical texts often have ritualistic uses, as opposed to psychological ones, and that experience reports are shaped by and contribute to ideological aims. However, Sharf’s essays, and the new materialist perspective more gen- erally, exhibit tendencies that, if followed to their logical conclusion, could lead to the elimination of the category of experience from re- ligious studies. While I am not out to defend the rhetoric of experience, I do wish to defend the category and study of experience from the tendencies in new materialism that would disparag