TOWARDS CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION by Jacob A. van Belzen ( 9789048134908 )

Item Details

Title:

TOWARDS CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION
PRINCIPLES, APPROACHES, APPLICATIONS

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£119.99
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ISBN 10:

9048134900

ISBN 13:

9789048134908

Publisher:

SPRINGER

Edition:

2010 ed.

Pages:

282

Description:

Cultural psychology and psychology of religion have a good deal in common: being major fields at the inception of psychology, they have become marginalized during the 20th century, but are both returning to the fore in impressive ways. Up to the present, however, they have remained rather distinct fields within psychology. Although there is increasing attention to religion in cultural psychology, the cultural psychological approach is hardly yet applied in psychology of religion. This book distinguishes different variants in cultural psychology, reviews contemporary research, and proposes to utilize cultural psychological approaches to the study of religion. The book points out the interdisciplinary character of cultural psychology of religion, discusses some current cultural psychological theories and their application to religion, and presents a number of examples from recent empirical research.

Synopsis:

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.

Illustrations:

XIV, 282 p.

Publication:

Netherlands

Imprint:

Springer

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

ASPECTS IN CONTEXTS (HB)

ASPECTS IN CONTEXTS (PB)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF RELIGIOUS LIVES (HB)