Fall 2009
Psy 490.1, Psychology of Religion
Mon 2 - 5:40 pm, Stevenson 3046
Syllabus in pdf
The main text for the course is The Psychology of Religion, 4th Edition, authors Ralph Hood, Peter Hill, & Bernard Spilka; publishers Guilford, 2009 (sold on Amazon). This latest edition is very current with recent studies on religious and spiritual experience, meditation & prayer, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, health & coping, positive psychology, mysticism, conversion experiences, spiritual transformation, attachment and its role in religious experience, images and emotion in religious experience, entheogens, and on. Only this 2009 text and not the 3d edition should be purchased.
This is a course that looks at psychological research on religion and spirituality; it's not a comparative religions course or a history of religions course, though these are very interesting and relevant to the topic.
We'll start by looking at spiritual and religious experience and try to understand what this is; and study the methodologies researchers and writers have used to study the religious experience psychologically. This means that we'll have active practice in projects using psychological methods such as surveys, ratings, phenomenology, and interviews. In addition to the topics listed above, we'll look at ritual and its place in religion, as well as pilgrimage, and the phenomenon of religious violence.
The course involve lectures that expand on the reading topics, and hands-on projects utilizing psychological research methods. The goal of the course is gain knowledge and information about the psychology of religions and of religious experience; to gain practice in using psychological methods of study; and to broaden our psychological perspective so that we take in more of the depth and complexity which characterize the study of religion. The course will help develop in you something called psychological-mindedness, a broad term signifying curiosity about experience, the ability to distance oneself from it sufficiently in order to see it and study it, and the capacity to see how different perspectives contribute to understanding a phenomenon more fully.