Although people may – as some psychologists argue -- be born with a tendency to become believers, specific religious traditions are cultural products that must be acquired through learning and socialization. In addition, religious beliefs and behaviors take on different meanings at different ages. This chapter starts with a discussion of religious socialization and the developmental psychology of religion. The chapter includes a detailed section on religious socialization in summer camps. Next, we examine the large body of research on the psychology of prayer. Psychologists of religion argue that even if prayer involves some matters beyond the reach of science, important aspects of the prayer experience can be addressed using good scientific practice. T. M. Luhrmann’s important work is considered in some detail; she argues that, ultimately, through prayer, religious believers start to experience part of their own minds as the presence of God. The chapter concludes with two comprehensive sections on: (1) religious and mystical experiences and (2) identity and religion. For some people, religious identity is closely tied to ethnic, racial, national, professional, and familial identities; indeed, religious identity may be derived from these other identities.

This chapter further explores the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology by examining their theory of spiritual sensation, a striking fusion of early modern sense theory, early Christian notions of deification, Puritan spirituality, and Platonic metaphysics. The Cambridge Platonists hold that when a soul becomes deified through the practice of virtue, God comes to dwell in it, and that as a result, the soul becomes able to know God directly by looking inward. This knowledge is the fruit of direct, perceptual contact with God, granting it a phenomenal quality that cannot be attained by mere descriptions of God. Conversely though, when a soul marred with vices looks inward in the attempt to know God, it inevitably forms a distorted picture of God that reflects its own moral flaws. Thus, the Cambridge Platonists’ theory of spiritual sensation undergirds their rejection of Calvinist doctrine, providing them with a sort of ‘error theory’ to explain how their theological opponents arrived at the views they did.

The Cambridge Platonists’ anti-Calvinism was undergirded by a Platonic epistemology of participation – an epistemology on which the faculty of reason allowed the soul to participate in, and thereby come to know, the nature of God. This epistemology, drawn largely from Plotinus, enabled them to defend and articulate their reasons for rejecting the arbitrary, voluntarist picture of God propagated by their Calvinist contemporaries, and defend their own, rival conception of God as unswervingly committed to communicating his overflowing goodness to all his creatures. The central component of this Platonic epistemology is a high view of human reason as a direct participation in the divine nature, where beauty, goodness and truth are inseparably united. This chapter introduces the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology by highlighting the ways in which they make conformity to God, both through purity of mind and virtuous action, a precondition for knowledge of God, resulting in a distinctive combination of Plotinian epistemology and Puritan spirituality.

Ways of Living Religion provides a philosophical analysis of different types of religious experience – ascetic, liturgical, monastic, mystical, devotional, compassionate, fundamentalist – that focuses on the lived experience of religion rather than reducing it to mere statements of belief or doctrine. Using phenomenology, Christina M. Gschwandtner distinguishes between different kinds of religious experiences by examining their central characteristics and defining features, as well as showing their continuity with human experience more broadly. The book is the first philosophical examination of several of these types, thus breaking new ground in philosophical thinking about religion. It is neither a confessional treatment nor a reduction of the lived experience to psychological or sociological phenomena. While Gschwandtner’s treatment focuses on Christian forms of expression of these different types, it opens the path to broader examinations of ways of living religion that might enable scholars to give a more nuanced account of their similarities and differences.

This chapter shows the persistence of the imperial imagination in Baeck’s thought during the First World War, and his later critique of theological colonization during the Weimar Republic. When the Great War broke out, Baeck volunteered to serve as an army chaplain (Feldrabbiner), a position he held for almost the entire war period. Baeck’s sermons and writing from the front exemplify his view of the East as a space for colonization as well as his reading of the German military predicament as paralleling Jewish history. Baeck’s stature as a public intellectual rose during the Weimar Republic, but he also recognized a growing danger in the resurgence of the figure of second-century heretic Marcion, among others in the work of Adolf von Harnack, who called for a de-canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Baeck identified this tendency as central in the German theological and political imagination of the time. Against neo-Marcionite attempts to detach Christianity and Germany from Judaism and the Jews, Baeck offered a presentation of Judaism that stressed its place as the ethical foundation of Christianity. Only Judaism, Baeck insisted, could save Christianity from itself.

This chapter raises the problematic of mediation as illustrated through the schema of a finite seashell trying to capture an infinite ocean. After providing a provisional definition of “mediation,” I lay out my central approach to a solution: to shed light on how such mediation can work in general by exploring how it works in the particular case of the Eastern Christian icon.

In this chapter the account of the Idea of the Good as the foundation of moral realism is applied to issues in religion and politics (Section #1). The question is raised and answered why Plato is confident that the gods are only good and not ever bad (Section #2). The theology of Laws10 is examined for some of the theological implications of the preeminence of the Good (Section #3). The concept of religious experience is introduced and its metaphysical underpinnings explained (Section #4). The problem of evil is addressed: how can the Good, the archē of everything, be the cause of evil? If it is not the cause, whence evil? (Section #5). The tensions between a metaphysics of the Good and the exigencies of politics, especially the authority of rulership, is examined (Section #6). The idea of the common good is introduced in order to determine if it is possible that the common good and the private good should conflict and if so, how does this impact Plato’s universal Good (Section #7). The connection between political expertise, consent, and legitimacy of types of government is examined (Section #8)

As he developed his own faith, working it out as he lived and wrote, Tolstoy responded to varieties of religious experience and expression, including English ones. From early on, Tolstoy found in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and the novels of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others, information about English religious life and examples of how to novelize religious experience. In turn, when Tolstoy emerged, later in life, as a religious seeker and moral authority, English readers responded to Tolstoy both as a novelist and as a thinker.

From a formal theological point of view, it would be common to distinguish the experience I describe in Chapter 8 from revelation: it would be called ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ experience rather than revelation as such. However, if revelation is God's self-revelation, that is, if it is always personal, then that act of communication in relationship is always a self-revealing. For a Christian, if this is truly God's self-revealing, then the hermeneutic context of the Christian tradition will bring a degree of intelligibility to the experience. In Chapter 9, I consider this possibility through an examination of the spiritual tradition of Ignatius Loyola. Ignatius sets great store on experience as the place where one might find God. To ‘find God in all things’ is to reflect on where God has passed in experience. Ignatian discernment is about becoming attentive to feeling; I argue that this is not simply learning to be attentive to emotions but to be sensitive to moods as ways of experiencing God’s presence, although this distinction goes beyond the letter of the Ignatian text. Ignatius’ approach can be helpful for contemporary reflection because it is coextensive with everyday life.

The vast majority of people worldwide are religious, but religions are enormously diverse. Psychiatric research has attended more to the paths that people take in pursuit of the special things that religion represents than it has to religion itself. Religion is generally supportive of good mental health, and facilitates coping with illness and adversity, but religious and spiritual struggles (e.g., anger towards God, demonic attributions, religious conflicts, guilt and doubt) can impair mental well-being. Religious experiences, both positive and negative, can be mistaken for psychopathology and therefore need to be taken into account in diagnosis, but a differential diagnosis between spiritual/religious experience and mental disorder is not always helpful. It is possible both to be having a meaningful religious experience and to be suffering from a diagnosable mental disorder. Good clinical practice requires an ability to talk with patients in a sensitive and respectful way about their religious concerns.