Would you like to participate in a special episode of the RSP that lets YOU steer the conversation and ask tough questions on the psychology of religion to a panel with some of the worlds top psychologists of religion? Thanks to The Religious Studies Project team, you now have that opportunity!
In a one-of-a-kind special edition of The Religious Studies Project we want to invite you to join us at the International Association for the Psychology of Religion 2013 world conference. On the 28th of this month a panel comprised of world-renowned psychologists of religion await to hear from you and answer your questions in the social scientific study of religion in general and the psychology of religion in specific. The Psychology of Religion Participatory Panel Special will be video recorded and published through our website soon after. The panel will feature the following leading academics: Pierre-Yves Brandt and Jacob A. Belzen, and former RSP interviewees Heinz Streib and Ralph W. Hood Jr.
Who can submit a question? Anyone!
You may submit your questions to RSP assistant editor Dr. Christopher F. Silver and panel moderator Thomas J. Coleman III by emailing us at editors@religiousstudiesproject.com, Twitter (@ProjectRS), Facebook, or by adding a public comment in the field below.
All questions will be considered but final discretion will lie with the RSP team. Please keep your questions as direct and brief as possible and be sure to include your name, and academic institution if you wish to be recognized on air.
Please spread the word, and thanks (in advance) for listening.
Where does the Psych of Rel stand on the Cognitive study of religion? You study the “mind”, but they say they only study the Brain. Are the two compatible?
I would have to make a brief comment here. Cognitive psychologists do not only study the brain, in fact many of them say that they only study the mind. The difference being that there is no direct form-function relationship that we know of and cognitive psychologists are only interested in how those mental mechanisms/proclivities/etc. of the mind operate to produce religious beliefs/actions. Limiting it to the study of the brain but not the mind would be a lower-level approach that wouldn’t include cognitive psychology but I could see an argument for cognitive neuroscience.
Not so much an issue with your question I guess, just an issue with the ridiculously broad “cognitive”
What responsibility lies before the social sciences in general and psychologist of religion in particular when it comes to the application of labels to the populations or individuals they study? For example, can or should we label the growing number of people in the world who identify as having no religion and / or no belief in the Transcendent as “religious” or “believing”?
Where does ‘experience’ stand in the Psychology of Religion? Does one study the factors and processes associated with individual claims to ‘religious experiences’, or does one treat these experiences as phenomena in-and-of themselves? And what might be the implications of affirming, denying, or setting aside the subjectively claimed supernatural origin of these experiences?
I would like to ask: Do you believe that evolutionary theory can be used as unifying framework to study religion, why or why not?