Page 201. RETHINKING THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION DAVID M. WULFF The early yea... more Page 201. RETHINKING THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION DAVID M. WULFF The early years of the psychology of religion are commonly summed up today in terms of the elegantly simple rise-and ...
Religion: Immediate Experience and the Mediacy of Research, 2007
Page 261. Empirical Research on Religion Perspectives from the Psychology of Religion DAVID M. WU... more Page 261. Empirical Research on Religion Perspectives from the Psychology of Religion DAVID M. WULFF Wheaton College, Norton, USA The psychology of religion is, in principle, a strictly nonsectarian discipline that applies ...
Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 10, 1999
Page 15. BEYOND BELIEF AND UNBELIEF David M. Wulff ABSTRACT The word" belief and its derivat... more Page 15. BEYOND BELIEF AND UNBELIEF David M. Wulff ABSTRACT The word" belief and its derivatives, although still widely thought to characterize the essential religious attitude, have proved on closer examination to be surprisingly inapt. ...
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2019
Defining religion and finding ways to assess it in individual lives has long challenged psycholog... more Defining religion and finding ways to assess it in individual lives has long challenged psychologists of religion. At first, open-ended questionnaires were used, but with the advent of modern statistical methods, a succession of religiosity scales was developed. But these usually brief scales were typically based on the preconceptions of their authors, who were overwhelmingly Protestant Christian and often conservative, much as were those who completed them. To provide a more adequate way of assessing "faith," a term here encompassing both religious and nonreligious attitudes, a new assessment device was developed that incorporates the singular advantages of Q methodology. The Faith Q-Sort consists of 101 statements that respondents sort on a nine-category continuum, indicating the degree to which each statement describes himself or herself. Factor analysis based on correlations of the sorts rather than individual items yielded, for the initial group of participants, three major prototypes and five minor ones, accounting for 67 percent of the variance. Of the 42 participants, 31 proved to be exemplars of one or another of the eight prototypes. Subsequent explorations illustrate the wealth of possibilities the FQS offers, both as a research instrument and a counseling tool.
ABSTRACT [presents a] review of the psychology of religion / finds that some of the most influent... more ABSTRACT [presents a] review of the psychology of religion / finds that some of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century have directed attention to religious experience / conceptualizes that there are 2 trends in [the psychology of religion]: the descriptive and the explanatory / the descriptive method accepts religious expression on its own terms and resists the reification into narrow categories of institutional religiosity / the explanatory approach seeks to understand religious experience on the basis of psychological, biological, and environmental constituents / advocates developing a comprehensive view that prompts a relativistic stance to religious expression recommends that clinicians become as broadly acquainted as possible with various perspectives and cautions against the use of a simple formula to explicate religious experience / reminds that the appeal of certain theories may reflect the individual's own personal experience of religion / perspectives that [the author] introduces may provide a heuristic tool for understanding an individual's religious experience (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 2002, Vol 47(3), 2... more ABSTRACT Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 2002, Vol 47(3), 294-297. The reviewer notes that in this book (see record 1999-04320-000), Ann Taves aims "to highlight the complex interplay between experiencing religion and explaining religion over time" (p. 10). She explores the historical dialectic between those who give themselves over to religious experiences and construe them in accord with some religious tradition, and those who step back from such experiences and apply a reductive explanation to them, often in an attitude of criticism or attack. To carry out her analysis, Taves constructs a narrative that traces the emergence and interaction of three "chains of interpretation": (a) a supernatural tradition, which views a particular experience as evidence of divine (or demonic) forces; (b) a natural tradition, which interprets it as the product of strictly human processes; and (c) a mediating tradition, which accepts naturalistic interpretations while still maintaining the experience's religious significance. Taves' framework is a promising one, and she makes valuable connections; yet the book's logic, even on the sentence level, is sometimes elusive, and it was not altogether clear what the practical implications are for the study of experience, religious, or otherwise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1985
AS the Wiirzburg school passed into history, its method of experimental introspection was adopted... more AS the Wiirzburg school passed into history, its method of experimental introspection was adopted for the study of religious experience by Protestant theologian Karl Girgensohn and his followers, collectively known as the Dorpat school of religious psychology. Through the painstaking research reported in his Der seelische Aufiau des religiijsen Erlebens (1921), Girgensohn sought to find in religious experience its essential elements. Under the leadership of Girgensohn's successor, Werner Gruehn, a decade of productive work followed, featuring research on children and adolescents, individual differences, and practical applications. Virtually halted by World War 11, the work of the Dorpat school represents today a still viable ideal. The Wurzburg school of psychology, whose extensive use of the novel method of systematic experimental introspection revolutionized the study of thinking, was paradoxically destined to pass from the scene within a decade of its inception. A major factor in its demise, certainly, was the departure in 1909 of its leader, Oswald Kiilpe, to take a chair at Bonn. Once there, Kiilpe turned his attention to other, more philosophical, matters. Another challenge came from the apparent limits of the method itself: the "determining tendency" hypothesized by the Wiirzburg researchers proved to be unavailable to introspective analysis. Indeed, introspection, which William James had declared was "what we have to rely on first and foremost and always," was soon to be excluded entirely from American psychology's official armamentarium. Among psychologists of religion, however, especially those in Europe, selfobservation remained a vital tool. Wilhelm Stlhlin placed it in fact at the very heart of the research enterprise: introspection, he said, is "a prerequisite for every [other] method in the psychology of religion." * The Wiirzburg school's experimental variant of it seemed to him especially promising, and he was the first to employ it in the study of religious experience.* THE FOUNDING OF THE DORPAT SCHOOL It fell to Karl Girgensohn (1875-1925), however, to found a school upon this method, and to gather around himself-first in Dorpat and then in Greifswald and Leipzig-an international group of scholars. The so-called Dorpat school of religious psychology arose, ironically, at the very time that the Wiirzburg school was in eclipse. The climate in psychology was shifting, new schools were springing up, and thus it was left chiefly to theologians to apply the Wurzburg method to religious experience. I wish to thank Prof. Dr. Alfons Bolley and Lic. Theol. Kurt Gins for their kind generosity in supplying me with copies of some of the sources cited in this article. Mrs.
Page 201. RETHINKING THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION DAVID M. WULFF The early yea... more Page 201. RETHINKING THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION DAVID M. WULFF The early years of the psychology of religion are commonly summed up today in terms of the elegantly simple rise-and ...
Religion: Immediate Experience and the Mediacy of Research, 2007
Page 261. Empirical Research on Religion Perspectives from the Psychology of Religion DAVID M. WU... more Page 261. Empirical Research on Religion Perspectives from the Psychology of Religion DAVID M. WULFF Wheaton College, Norton, USA The psychology of religion is, in principle, a strictly nonsectarian discipline that applies ...
Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 10, 1999
Page 15. BEYOND BELIEF AND UNBELIEF David M. Wulff ABSTRACT The word" belief and its derivat... more Page 15. BEYOND BELIEF AND UNBELIEF David M. Wulff ABSTRACT The word" belief and its derivatives, although still widely thought to characterize the essential religious attitude, have proved on closer examination to be surprisingly inapt. ...
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2019
Defining religion and finding ways to assess it in individual lives has long challenged psycholog... more Defining religion and finding ways to assess it in individual lives has long challenged psychologists of religion. At first, open-ended questionnaires were used, but with the advent of modern statistical methods, a succession of religiosity scales was developed. But these usually brief scales were typically based on the preconceptions of their authors, who were overwhelmingly Protestant Christian and often conservative, much as were those who completed them. To provide a more adequate way of assessing "faith," a term here encompassing both religious and nonreligious attitudes, a new assessment device was developed that incorporates the singular advantages of Q methodology. The Faith Q-Sort consists of 101 statements that respondents sort on a nine-category continuum, indicating the degree to which each statement describes himself or herself. Factor analysis based on correlations of the sorts rather than individual items yielded, for the initial group of participants, three major prototypes and five minor ones, accounting for 67 percent of the variance. Of the 42 participants, 31 proved to be exemplars of one or another of the eight prototypes. Subsequent explorations illustrate the wealth of possibilities the FQS offers, both as a research instrument and a counseling tool.
ABSTRACT [presents a] review of the psychology of religion / finds that some of the most influent... more ABSTRACT [presents a] review of the psychology of religion / finds that some of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century have directed attention to religious experience / conceptualizes that there are 2 trends in [the psychology of religion]: the descriptive and the explanatory / the descriptive method accepts religious expression on its own terms and resists the reification into narrow categories of institutional religiosity / the explanatory approach seeks to understand religious experience on the basis of psychological, biological, and environmental constituents / advocates developing a comprehensive view that prompts a relativistic stance to religious expression recommends that clinicians become as broadly acquainted as possible with various perspectives and cautions against the use of a simple formula to explicate religious experience / reminds that the appeal of certain theories may reflect the individual's own personal experience of religion / perspectives that [the author] introduces may provide a heuristic tool for understanding an individual's religious experience (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 2002, Vol 47(3), 2... more ABSTRACT Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 2002, Vol 47(3), 294-297. The reviewer notes that in this book (see record 1999-04320-000), Ann Taves aims "to highlight the complex interplay between experiencing religion and explaining religion over time" (p. 10). She explores the historical dialectic between those who give themselves over to religious experiences and construe them in accord with some religious tradition, and those who step back from such experiences and apply a reductive explanation to them, often in an attitude of criticism or attack. To carry out her analysis, Taves constructs a narrative that traces the emergence and interaction of three "chains of interpretation": (a) a supernatural tradition, which views a particular experience as evidence of divine (or demonic) forces; (b) a natural tradition, which interprets it as the product of strictly human processes; and (c) a mediating tradition, which accepts naturalistic interpretations while still maintaining the experience's religious significance. Taves' framework is a promising one, and she makes valuable connections; yet the book's logic, even on the sentence level, is sometimes elusive, and it was not altogether clear what the practical implications are for the study of experience, religious, or otherwise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1985
AS the Wiirzburg school passed into history, its method of experimental introspection was adopted... more AS the Wiirzburg school passed into history, its method of experimental introspection was adopted for the study of religious experience by Protestant theologian Karl Girgensohn and his followers, collectively known as the Dorpat school of religious psychology. Through the painstaking research reported in his Der seelische Aufiau des religiijsen Erlebens (1921), Girgensohn sought to find in religious experience its essential elements. Under the leadership of Girgensohn's successor, Werner Gruehn, a decade of productive work followed, featuring research on children and adolescents, individual differences, and practical applications. Virtually halted by World War 11, the work of the Dorpat school represents today a still viable ideal. The Wurzburg school of psychology, whose extensive use of the novel method of systematic experimental introspection revolutionized the study of thinking, was paradoxically destined to pass from the scene within a decade of its inception. A major factor in its demise, certainly, was the departure in 1909 of its leader, Oswald Kiilpe, to take a chair at Bonn. Once there, Kiilpe turned his attention to other, more philosophical, matters. Another challenge came from the apparent limits of the method itself: the "determining tendency" hypothesized by the Wiirzburg researchers proved to be unavailable to introspective analysis. Indeed, introspection, which William James had declared was "what we have to rely on first and foremost and always," was soon to be excluded entirely from American psychology's official armamentarium. Among psychologists of religion, however, especially those in Europe, selfobservation remained a vital tool. Wilhelm Stlhlin placed it in fact at the very heart of the research enterprise: introspection, he said, is "a prerequisite for every [other] method in the psychology of religion." * The Wiirzburg school's experimental variant of it seemed to him especially promising, and he was the first to employ it in the study of religious experience.* THE FOUNDING OF THE DORPAT SCHOOL It fell to Karl Girgensohn (1875-1925), however, to found a school upon this method, and to gather around himself-first in Dorpat and then in Greifswald and Leipzig-an international group of scholars. The so-called Dorpat school of religious psychology arose, ironically, at the very time that the Wiirzburg school was in eclipse. The climate in psychology was shifting, new schools were springing up, and thus it was left chiefly to theologians to apply the Wurzburg method to religious experience. I wish to thank Prof. Dr. Alfons Bolley and Lic. Theol. Kurt Gins for their kind generosity in supplying me with copies of some of the sources cited in this article. Mrs.
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