Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul A Historical Entang
Neither a book about the psychology of spirituality nor America’s ongoing turf wars between religion and science, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul takes to task many of the presumed relationships between the two—from sharing common concern
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Series Editor Robert W. Rieber Fordham University New York, NY USA
For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6927
Graham Richards
Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul A Historical Entanglement
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Graham Richards Graham Richards Books 1 Claremont Road Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN1 1SY United Kingdom [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-7172-2 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-7173-9 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2010935848 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. 987654321 Printed in the United States of America. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
For two people to whose long-time support I am forever indebted: Mary Midgley and John Radford
If you do not understand the minds of others Never slander others or condemn their views Lest you be misled by self-conceit and egotism. Milarepa. Trans. by Garma C. C. Chang
Preface
I must begin by explaining the origins of this book, since they have a crucial bearing on the form in which it has finally emerged. Shortly after publishing ‘Race’, Racism and Psychology. Towards a Reflexive History in 1997 my friend Rob Iliffe, a now eminent Newtonian scholar at Imperial College London, invited me to contribute a conference paper on the relationship between Psychology and religion to a symposium he was organising for a major history of religion conference. I cobbled something together with which I was fairly smugly satisfied. It quickly dawned on me that the topic was ripe for fresh historical treatment and that, given the crucial issues with which it was concerned, was, in a sense, ‘the Big One’. In Richards (1998) I published a programmatic paper ‘Psychology and Religion: A Suitable Case for Historical Treatment’ in the British Psychological Society’s History & Philosophy of Psychology Section journal. At that point, I assumed the book would involve a relatively straightforward application of the same approach as I had adopted in ‘Race’, Racism and Psychology. I was wrong. Provisional plot-lines kept collapsing, the scale of the research and learning required for such a work kept expanding, and I was ever more acutely aware of the reflexive dimension of the project. To embark on it with one’
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