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.

In delineating the causes or reasons for a thing’s being, Aristotle notes, “what something is and what it is for are one …” (Aristotle 1984, 198a25–6). The nature and structure of a thing and its purpose coincide. The nature and structure of a table is what it is for. The nature and structure of the heart is no different than its purpose, to pump blood. And so it is, as I shall argue, with Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed (c. 1190). The structure of the work is intimately related to its purpose and ultimate goal. That there is an overall structure needs to be unpacked, and that the structure, overall and even within its discrete parts, serves a particular end also needs to be clarified. If this programmatic essay succeeds, it will provide a framework for reading the essays that follow. Each essay may be read as offering insight to the specific issue at hand, but also may be read as, in its own way, aiming at the ultimate purpose of the work as a whole.