Springer Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion: Principles, Approaches, Applications

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. Review From the reviews: “In just 237 pages of text, this book achieves these aims remarkably well and more. Much of the discussion is relevant to the whole field of psychology. … In short, any graduate student in either cultural psychology or the psychology of religion needs to read this book. American psychologists will probably find diverse perspectives that are both provocative and engaging, both challenging and enlightening.” (Lê X. Hy, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 56 (14), April, 2011) "As the first introduction to contemporary cultural psychology of religion, this book will appeal especially to psychologists and psychiatrists, but also to any scholar interested in culture and conceiving of it as the critical ingredient to understanding an individual, a given society, and the role of religion in the life or lives studied.  Belzen’s repeated protestations that these aims are modest are countered by his trenchant literature review, which indicates that culture has at best been used as a variable among others in psychological research in the twentieth century; at worst culture has been completely ignored in favor of studies that aim for objective results, irrespective of cultural or individual idiosyncrasies.  The monumentous review of literature in this work is as keen and probing as they come, which adds to the persuasiveness of Belzen’s modest appeal to cultural psychology of religion, while at the same time making obvious how stacked the trends in literature are against such a “modest” appeal.  Belzen’s exposition is shrewd and creative in its ability to identify problems in psychology of religion, and how cultural psychology of religion can possibly solve them, but at this high price point and given the expansive literature review, it is meant for a well-informed and wealthy audience.  This book is a must acquire, therefore, for any major university research library." (Joseph M. Kramp, John Jay College, CUNY) From the Back Cover This book takes a bold stand: all psychology should be culturally sensitive psychology, especially when studying religious phenomena. It explains that culture is not simply to be conceived of as a variable that possibly influences behavior. Rather, it stresses that cultural patterns of acting, thinking and experiencing are created, adopted and promulgated by a number of individuals jointly. As human subjectivity is different in different cultures, cultural psychology is not interested in comparatively investigating how experiences and behavior, attitudes and social relationships present themselves within different cultural conditions. By consequence, cultural psychology does not start from Western psychological constructs, testing for their presence in other cultures, but from human acts and activities in specific cultures, analyzing them in a hermeneutical way. Like cultural psychology, psychology of religion currently enjoys more and more interest and rapid growth. But the two fields have remained rather unconnected in the recent past. Psychological researc