Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 1991. Marston, Daniel. The American Revolution 1774-1783.
Chapter 1 Introducing Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. The word “ psychology‖ comes from the Greek words “psyche” meaning life, and “ logos” meaning explanation. Psychology is interested in the nature of humans and how human beings function. However, psychology is by no means the only field of inquiry that seeks answers to the puzzles of human nature. The roots of psychology can be traced to the ancient philosopher based on their early records to understand psychology.
The main reason Lawrence Cunningham and John Kelsay use a phenomenological view point towards religion is for a better understanding. A better understand on a number of aspects for multiple different religions. The phenomenological approach helps them accomplish this by letting them look at religion in an un-bias way and be totally accepting of that religion’s traditions and ideas of sacred. They state in the text, “At its simplest, a phenomenological approach leads to an effort to understand religious thought and behavior from the point of view of the religious person.”, (Cunningham and Kelsay 4) this means that if that person says that a certain book or object is sacred we take them at their word that that book or object is sacred. Phenomenology is also geared towards creating a framework for understanding religious traditions.
For Durkheim shared religious rituals reinforced the collective conscience and maintain social integration. Durkheim also says that religion helps individuals with cognitive functions, as it teaches us basic concepts. Anthropologist, Malinowski says that religion promotes solidarity. He says it performs important psychological functions in two situations. When the outcome is important but uncontrollable, and at times of crisis.
Keller, 167-168. [ 20 ]. Ibid., 168. [ 21 ]. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York, NY: Harcourt Publishing, 1958), 90, Kindle.
The argument from religious experience states that if we can experience God, then surely God must exist because what we experience must be real. There are many philosophers that try to explain this but the one I am going to focus on in this essay is William James. James defines religious experience as though it should be the primary topic in the study if religion rather than religious institutions, since institutions are merely the social descendent of genius. He also defines a religious experience as, 'The feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatsoever they may consider divine.’ To James a prominent feature of religious experience is mysticism. He says, '...propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical...' The marks to which he is referring to are inefficiently, notices quality, transiency and passivity.
For the Puritans, who have such a high influence in religion and in God, their science was meshed with religion as well. Winthrop believed that nature was created by God, and thus the Puritans' way of the science was more of an act of worship. On the other hand, Franklin was a discoverer. He wanted to find out how things work and how they evolve and end up. Franklin wants to understand the nature not the belief that God created nature ideas by the Puritans.
In making sure that the secular psychology principles align with biblical thinking the biological issues seem to be forgotten. While it is optimal that every human’s make up consist of all the right parts, not every personality will come to counseling complete due to external circumstances and life’s path in general. Hawkin’s model implies that every human beings make-up contains a complete personality and the core is influenced by the Holy Spirit. This is a weakness because only a Christian’s core has the ability to be influenced by the Holy Spirit. It is more reasonable to lean towards Crabb’s model in this area because he discusses the development of maturity in the Christian walk.
Lynch and Richards (2010) stated, “He has added significantly to our understanding of clinical and theoretical issues and provided us with wise input on complex group, organizational, and political dilemmas” (p. 1). Within this article, the importance of psychoanalysis is highlighted as well as the reasoning behind Rangell’s interest within psychology. Rangell was fascinated with Freud’s findings, especially taking interest in the study of anxiety, and went beyond Freud’s research to satisfy his own curiosities. The article informs the reader of Rangell’s journey, what he discovered, and the major influence he was to psychoanalysis. Moreira (2012) stated, “Humanistic-phenomenological psychotherapy is a contemporary development of person-centered therapy” (p. 3).
Functionalism: Two functionalist called Talcott Parsons and George Murdock argued that every single society will have a religion due to religious institutions have certain functions which have a say to the survival of the system as whole just as the organs of the body have functions which are essential for the body’s survival. People are born into civilization and automatically become the product of all the social influences around them as they are socialised by a variety of institutions such as the family, education system, media and religion. Functionalism normally sees civilization as a system; for example a set of interconnected