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2007 - 2010: Boston UniversityReligious and Psychological Well-being
Abstract
AbstractThe soul’s psychological and spiritual well-being is a matter of ultimate concern to human beings. A host of beliefs and practices across cultures and eras testify to its importance, as do widely shared spiritual longings and the exquisite existential agonies of every human life. In particular, the world’s religions and folk traditions carry forward a wealth of practical wisdom about how to achieve spiritual well-being in relation both to ultimate realities and to the natural and social environments of human life. Numerous religious practices propose paths to spiritual transformation, and many therapeutic techniques claim to promote psychological healing. Unfortunately, these diverse perspectives are not now coordinated, commensurate, or even in disciplined conversation with one another. The practical inseparability of psychological health and spiritual well-being suggests that all of these perspectives must play a role in any adequate understanding of the human soul and of the dismaying challenges that compel human beings to seek spiritual transformation and psychological well-being. The Danielsen Institute at Boston University proposes to bring these perspectives together, purposefully and creatively, in a three- to four-year program of Templeton Research Lectures and interdisciplinary research. A research-oriented dialogue among the psychological sciences, including the emerging psychological disciplines of cognitive science, neurobehavioral science, and evolutionary psychology, on the one hand, and philosophy, theology, and religious studies, on the other hand, promises decisive breakthroughs in our understanding of mental health, character development, social transformation, and spiritual well-being. The Danielsen Institute’s unique clinical and research programs and its connections to research groups across the schools of Boston University and throughout the richly endowed Boston intellectual landscape make it an extremely promising place to mount such a research project. The project’s interdisciplinary Research Group consists of experts with integrative knowledge of religion and psychological science as well as significant experience in successful multidisciplinary collaborative research ventures. The psychologists represent neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology of religion, clinical psychology, pastoral psychology, and psychotherapy. Most are people of faith from various religious traditions and several are seminary graduates. Likewise, the committee includes scholars of the philosophy of science, Christian theology, Buddhist studies, comparative religion, and ethics. Many have prior experience in working with scientific researchers, and all bring an appreciation for the integrity of rigorous scientific thought and methodology. Several of the psychologists are also psychotherapists. All are committed to creating new paradigms, languages, measures, and practices for addressing the human soul’s ultimate needs. The program has three priorities: collaborative research, public impact, and interdisciplinary education. An annual Templeton Research Fellow and the associated Templeton Research Lectures will play a major role in all three aspects of the program.
Upcoming Lectures and ActivitiesYear 1 Theme: Religious Experience from the Ordinary to the Anomalous. Year 2 Theme: Character Development, Spiritual Transformation, & Social Change. Year 3 Theme: Meaning Construction and Value Discovery. From the theological, philosophical, and existential side comes another set of questions pertaining to the objectivity and truth of purported meaning structures. Psychological and social scientists strive to remain value-neutral, just reporting on what they discover about the way human beings construct meaning and manage their lives. Religion, by contrast, is committed to normative judgments and intentional practices that presuppose and express particular values. What kinds of links are there from the normative to the descriptive and back again? The most empirically complex and theoretically difficult questions of all concern whether and in what senses human beings actually discover values in the various processes by which they construct meaning. Directly connected to this are other questions: What counts as mental health and spiritual well-being? Do the associated values change across cultures and eras? Do they recur across cultural constructions of social reality? Do they reliably guide the social functions of diverse religious groups? Year 4 Theme: Therapeutic Models and Spiritual Practices.
Project LeadersProject Leader Robert C. Neville, Ph.D., D.D. (Project Leader): At Boston University, Robert Cummings Neville is Executive Director of the Danielsen Institute, Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology, and former Dean of Marsh Chapel and Chaplain of the University. From 1988-2003, he was Dean of the Boston University School of Theology. Before coming to Boston University, Dr. Neville taught at Yale University where he took his doctorate, Fordham University, the State University of New York College at Purchase, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he was Dean of Arts and Humanities. The author of 20 books and many articles, he worked at the Hastings Center in its early days where he directed the task force on the Ethics of Behavior Control. He was Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (for behavioral topics) and he directed the collaborative Comparative Religious Ideas Project at Boston University, whose findings are published in The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, and Religious Truth (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), three highly acclaimed volumes which he edited. He is currently working on a systematic theology arising from the major world religions and engaging the sciences, arts, and normative disciplines. Project Director Brian H. McCorkle, Ph.D. (Project Director):Brian McCorkle is the Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology, which is the research arm of the Danielsen Institute at Boston University. He studied pastoral care at the Episcopal Divinity School and spent many years as an administrator at Harvard University before earning a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Boston University. During four years on the research staff of the Boston University Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation he was involved in a variety of quantitative and qualitative research projects, as well as teaching research design courses to graduate students in psychiatric rehabilitation counseling. Notably, during four years as Project Director and Co-Principal Investigator of the Boston University site of the Consumer-Operated Service Project, an eight-state federally funded multisite collaborative, he gained considerable experience in grant management and collaborative research. During his three years directing the Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology, he has shown considerable creativity in conducting empirical research projects with minimal funding, and in engaging students in meaningful research projects that are leading to jointly authored publications. He also consistently receives excellent reviews from undergraduate and graduate students for his courses in research methods and psychology.
Organizing Committee/Working GroupRobert C. Neville, Ph.D., D.D. (Project Leader): At Boston University, Robert Cummings Neville is Executive Director of the Danielsen Institute, Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology, and former Dean of Marsh Chapel and Chaplain of the University. From 1988-2003, he was Dean of the Boston University School of Theology. Before coming to Boston University, Dr. Neville taught at Yale University where he took his doctorate, Fordham University, the State University of New York College at Purchase, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he was Dean of Arts and Humanities. The author of 20 books and many articles, he worked at the Hastings Center in its early days where he directed the task force on the Ethics of Behavior Control. He was Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (for behavioral topics) and he directed the collaborative Comparative Religious Ideas Project at Boston University, whose findings are published in The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, and Religious Truth (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), three highly acclaimed volumes which he edited. He is currently working on a systematic theology arising from the major world religions and engaging the sciences, arts, and normative disciplines. Linda L. Barnes, Ph.D.: Linda L. Barnes is a medical anthropologist, historian, and religion scholar whose work bridges these disciplines. As a member of the faculty of the Departments of Family Medicine and Pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine, she teaches about issues in cross-cultural patient care. She also directs the Boston Healing Landscape Project, an institute for the study of religions, medicines, and healing based at the School of Medicine that focuses on culturally and religiously grounded complementary/alternative medicines among patient communities served at Boston Medical Center, New England's largest safety-net hospital. Many of these practices address culturally based versions of spirituality and psychology. Her research and writing encompass the social history of Chinese healing practices in the West; African Diaspora healing practices in the United States; as well as religious pluralism in the United States, culturally based forms of religious healing, and their implications for medical practice. Malcolm David Eckel, Ph.D.: Malcolm David Eckel is Associate Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University, where he leads an interdisciplinary investigation of ethics and public values at the intersection of the humanities and the social and natural sciences. The Institute is currently engaged in a three-year project to investigate the many dimensions of the concept of "evil." Prof. Eckel received his Ph.D. in comparative religion from Harvard University in 1980 and taught at Middlebury College and Harvard Divinity School, where he served as Administrative Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions. In 1990 he joined the faculty at Boston University, where he has received the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching and served as the Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Humanities. He also has served as a member of Boston University's Comparative Religions Ideas Project, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humantities. Prof. Eckel's most recent books are To See the Buddha: A Philosopher's Quest for the Meaning of Emptiness (Princeton University Press) and Buddhism (Oxford University Press). He is currently working on a book called Metaphors Buddhist Live By. This project explores the metaphorical connections between Buddhist thought and the practical concerns of Buddhist life. Catherine L. Caldwell-Harris, Ph.D.:Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Associate Professor of Psychology, received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Psychology from University of California, San Diego in 1991, where her training included work on artificial neural networks and psycholinguistic experiments. A faculty member in the Brain, Behavior and Cognition doctoral program, she directs the Psycholinguistics Laboratory and studies diverse aspects of the mind and brain, from bilingualism to emotional processing and the brain-bases of normal and abnormal personality variation. A focus in the last five years has been on how personality factors interact with culture to produce vulnerabilities to poor mental health. In March 2005, she organized a symposium at the Eastern Psychological Association, titled Religion, brain and mind: Individual and cultural variability. Current projects on religion include testing whether skin conductance responses to religious phrases are predicted by current religious beliefs or by childhood beliefs, and what personality factors predict atheism and whether specific attributes (such as familialism, sociability or biophilia) ameliorate the standard finding that nonreligious individuals have lower subjective well-being than do religious individuals. She has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience, and the National Institutes of Mental Health. Her publications have appeared in experimental psychology journals and psychiatric journals. Deborah A. Kelemen, Ph.D.: Deborah Kelemen directs the Child Cognition Lab in the Psychology Department of Boston University. She earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Arizona. Her research explores the relationship between children's and adults' concepts, with specific interests in how children and adults reason about the natural kind and artifact domains and the development of their naïve theories about psychological, biological and inanimate phenomena. Recent projects have focused on the development of the teleological tendency to explain objects and events in terms of their purpose and design, the development of children's artifact concepts, children's reasoning about object origins and identity and the development of conventionalized behavior. Other areas of interest include the origin and development of intuitions about intentional agency and the evolutionary and cultural origins of explanatory biases. Brian H. McCorkle, Ph.D. (Project Director):Brian McCorkle is the Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology, which is the research arm of the Danielsen Institute at Boston University. He studied pastoral care at the Episcopal Divinity School and spent many years as an administrator at Harvard University before earning a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Boston University. During four years on the research staff of the Boston University Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation he was involved in a variety of quantitative and qualitative research projects, as well as teaching research design courses to graduate students in psychiatric rehabilitation counseling. Notably, during four years as Project Director and Co-Principal Investigator of the Boston University site of the Consumer-Operated Service Project, an eight-state federally funded multisite collaborative, he gained considerable experience in grant management and collaborative research. During his three years directing the Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology, he has shown considerable creativity in conducting empirical research projects with minimal funding, and in engaging students in meaningful research projects that are leading to jointly authored publications. He also consistently receives excellent reviews from undergraduate and graduate students for his courses in research methods and psychology. Patrick McNamara, Ph.D.: Patrick McNamara is Director of the Evolutionary Neurobehavior Laboratory, in the Department of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine and the Veterans Administration New England HealthCare System. Upon graduating from the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Boston University in 1991, he trained at the Aphasia Research Center at the Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center in neurolinguistics and brain-cognitive correlation techniques. He then began developing an evolutionary approach to problems of brain and behavior, and currently is studying the evolution of the frontal lobes, the evolution of the two mammalian sleep states (REM and NREM), and the evolution of religion in human cultures. He has published numerous articles and chapters on these topics pioneering the investigation of the role of the frontal lobes in mediation of religious experience. Most recently, he acted as Series Editor for the Praeger series of books on the evolutionary and biological roots of religion (Project on Religion and Brain). Shelly Rambo, M.Div., Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University School of Theology. She received her PhD in theology from Emory University's Graduate Division of Religion in 2004, as well as master's degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary and Yale University. A constructive feminist theologian, she engages the textual tradition of Christianity with particular attention to literary analysis and criticism. She places her work at the intersection of religious studies and comparative literature, giving attention to questions of rhetoric, aesthetics, and the religious "turn" in literary theory. Trained as both a systematic and constructive theologian, she is interested in how classical themes in the Christian tradition interact with and inform contemporary discourses around suffering, trauma, and violence. In her current project, she develops a pneumatology of Holy Saturday, from the intersection of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, contemporary trauma theory, and readings of the Johannine passion narrative. Her teaching and research interests include: feminist theory and theology, trauma studies, the rhetoric of religious writing, pneumatology, and postmodern biblical theology. Chris R. Schlauch, M.Div., Ph.D.:Chris Schlauch is Chair of the division of Religion, Culture, and Personality in the Boston University School of Theology, and Coordinator of two Ph.D. programs in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences: Counseling Psychology and Religion, and Psychology of Religion. He came to Boston in 1985 as Assistant Director for Professional Services at the Danielsen Institute and Adjunct Assistant Professor, and became a full-time faculty member in 1988. Dr. Schlauch’s primary research interests concern methodology. He is currently working on three manuscripts: an interdisciplinary theory of self (The Varieties of Selves); a critical method in psychology of religion (Another Way Around), and a pastoral theological study (Interpreting Faith in Our Time). Dr. Schlauch has served on the Advisory Committee of the Pastoral Counselor Examination Board and on the Editorial Committee of the Journal of Pastoral Theology, and he continues to serve on the Editorial Committee of The Journal of Pastoral Care. He has served as an external reviewer for The Journal of Religion and on behalf of various presses. A member of the Society for Pastoral Theology since 1986, he served for the past four years on the Steering Committee of The Society. George Stavros, M.Div., Ph.D.:George Stavros is currently the Director of the Danielsen Institute Clinic, a multidisciplinary mental health clinic and pastoral counseling center located on the Boston University campus. His clinical work is focused on treating couples, young adults, adolescents and their families, and clergy. He also has ongoing interest in the interface of Eastern Orthodox Christian pastoral theology and psychotherapy as healing disciplines. He has been an Adjunct Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, teaching courses in marriage and family, pastoral psychology, and the theology of pastoral care. He is a licensed psychologist and certified pastoral counselor, and before joining the Danielsen Institute, spent four years as an Intensive Outpatient Program Director at Two Brattle Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His doctoral research focused on the effects of practicing contemplative prayer in the Easter Orthodox tradition (The Jesus Prayer) on participants’ psychological, relational, and spiritual well-being. Kirk Wegter-McNelly, M.Div., Ph.D.: Kirk Wegter-McNelly is Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University, where he teaches and writes about the challenges of reformulating Christian theology in light of constructive interplay with contemporary scientific ideas and perspectives. Dr. Wegter-McNelly also helps to direct Boston University’s “Science, Philosophy, and Religion” program, which promotes constructive and cross-cultural approaches to theoretical and practical problems that lie at the intersection of scientific, philosophical, and religious domains. He is currently developing a theological assessment of physical relationality in light of recent scientific advances and philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Dr. Wegter-McNelly has taken part in several high-level interdisciplinary conferences focusing on scientific perspectives on divine action as well as a recent conference on the problem of evil – all co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. He has authored numerous articles on the relation between religion and science and has co-edited two collections of essays, one oriented toward the religion-and-science research community and the other toward a wider audience: Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences/Vatican Observatory, 2001) and Science and the Spiritual Quest: New Essays by Leading Scientists (Routledge, 2002). Wesley J. Wildman, Ph.D.: Wesley J. Wildman, Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics, is Chair of the Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics Department at Boston University's School of Theology, and Convener of the Graduate School's doctoral program in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. He has been a member of the Boston-based Comparative Religious Ideas Research Project, the Divine Action Project jointly sponsored by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences and the Vatican Observatory, the Religion and Brain Project based at Boston University School of Medicine's Evolutionary Neurobehavior Laboratory, and the Relational Ontology Project within the Templeton Humble Approach Initiative. He is author of Fidelity with Plausibility: Modest Christologies in the Twentieth Century (SUNY, 1997), and coeditor of Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue (Routledge, 1996) and Encyclopedia of Science and Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2003). Author of over sixty-five scholarly articles and book chapters, his research involves inquiry into theological and ethical topics using resources from multiple disciplines, including the natural and human sciences. His research and publications have embraced topics such as religious experience, religious language, religious knowledge, religion and ethics, religion and the human condition, theories of ultimate realities, theories of divine action, theories of religious genius, theories of comparison in relation to religious ideas, and theories of rational inquiry.
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