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As should be well known, virtually all the founding fathers of psychology contributed something to the subdiscipline presently called psychology of religion. However, in spite of its lengthy history, this psychology of religion is a problematic enterprise and many of its basic questions – e.g., What kind of scholarship, if any, is it? What is its place in academia? What it is about? – still await answers. To some observers, research on religion is a field of applied psychology (Strien 1990): what is known from other branches of psychology can be used to analyze religion. Others, however, strongly opposed to this view, argue that psychology of religion belongs to theoretical psychology (Ouwerkerk 1986; Vergote 1983/1997). To them, religiosity is a test of the scope of more general psychological theories: Are these psychologies able to deal with religiosity? Can they take account of the special relationship the person is involved in, for instance, when praying, when speaking words into a void, addressing 'someone" from whom no answer is expected, yet claiming that this moment fills life with meaning? As with other significant psychological research focusing on a specific domain (e.g., art, literature, sport, war and peace), there is no clear institutional unity among people involved in psychology of religion: they are found in departments of philosophy, psychiatry, anthropology, religious studies and in the various specialized departments of psychology.

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-3491-5_4

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