In the past four decades or so, the so-called psychology of religion – after having been deemed extinct, impossible or unlikely – has risen to prominence again: the number of publications is rapidly growing, an impressive secondary literature (handbooks, introductions, etc.) is available already, infrastructure has been developed (a number of new journals devoted to the subject have been founded, organizations have been established, increasingly funding is going to the area), attracting many new researchers. Organizations like the American Psychological Association are now publishing in the field of psychology of religion (and its Div. 36 [“psych of rel”] with almost 3,000 members is already midsized among the APA-divisions). This book documents this re-emergence and development.
In 2015, both the journal Archive for the Psychology of Religion and the International Association for the Psychology of Religion (IAPR), the bearer of the journal, completed their first century. This occasion prompted extensive historical research to the scientific infrastructure concerned, and critical reflection on their reason for existence, dealing with questions such as: How is the psychology of religion doing? What is it about? Which factors play a role? Whom does it serve? What has been the place and value of the infrastructure now celebrating its existence? This celebrating supplement to the Archive for the Psychology of Religion expands this discussion of IAPR’s history and continues its critical reflexion.
This volume positions itself on the cutting edge of two fields in psychology that enjoy rapidly increasing attention: both the study of human lives and some core domains of such lives as religion and spirituality are high on the agenda of current research and teaching. Biographies and autobiographies are being approached in new ways and have become central to the study of human lives as an object of research and a preferred method for obtaining unique data about subjective human experiences. Ever since the beginning of the psychology of religion, autobiographies have also been pointed out as an important source of information about psychic processes involved in religiosity. In this volume, a number of leading theoreticians and researchers from Europe and the USA try to bring them back to this field by drawing on new insights and latest developments in psychological theory.
The aims pursued in this book are quite modest. The text is not an introduction in the traditional sense to any psychological subdiscipline or field of application, nor does it present anything essentially new. Rather, it shows ‘work in progress’, as it attempts to contribute to an integration of two differently structured, but already existing fields within psychology. In order to explain this, it is probably best to say a few words about how the book came into being and about what it hopes to achieve. As a project, the volume owes very much to others. While lecturing in places ranging from South Africa to Canada and from California through European co- tries to Korea, colleagues have often urged me to come up with a volume on ‘c- tural psychology of religion’. For reasons that should become clear in the text, I feel uncomfortable with such a demand. To my understanding, there exists no single cultural psychology of religion. Rather, there are ever expanding numbers of div- gent types of psychologies, some of which are applied to understanding religious aspects of human lives or to researching specific religious phenomena, while others are not. Within this heterogeneous field that is, correctly or not, still designated as ‘psychology’, there are also many approaches that are sometimes referred to as ‘cultural psychology’ or as ‘culturally sensitive psychologies’. It would be wor- while applying many of these to research on religious phenomena, but at present not too many are in fact so applied.
The aims pursued in this book are quite modest. The text is not an introduction in the traditional sense to any psychological subdiscipline or field of application, nor does it present anything essentially new. Rather, it shows ‘work in progress’, as it attempts to contribute to an integration of two differently structured, but already existing fields within psychology. In order to explain this, it is probably best to say a few words about how the book came into being and about what it hopes to achieve. As a project, the volume owes very much to others. While lecturing in places ranging from South Africa to Canada and from California through European co- tries to Korea, colleagues have often urged me to come up with a volume on ‘c- tural psychology of religion’. For reasons that should become clear in the text, I feel uncomfortable with such a demand. To my understanding, there exists no single cultural psychology of religion. Rather, there are ever expanding numbers of div- gent types of psychologies, some of which are applied to understanding religious aspects of human lives or to researching specific religious phenomena, while others are not. Within this heterogeneous field that is, correctly or not, still designated as ‘psychology’, there are also many approaches that are sometimes referred to as ‘cultural psychology’ or as ‘culturally sensitive psychologies’. It would be wor- while applying many of these to research on religious phenomena, but at present not too many are in fact so applied.
Since 1914 the International Association for the Psychology of Religion (IAPR) publishes the Archiv für Religionspsychologie/Archive for the Psychology of Religion. It is a scholarly, trilingual (English, French and German) annual; most articles are in English language. The annual contains articles from a broad range of perspectives around the psychology of religion.
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