Abstract
This article is a review of T. M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. I engage the book from the perspective of psychology of religion and suggest that the book will be of interest to psychologists of religion for three reasons: (1) psychologists of religion have emphasized the importance of “context” and “culture” in recent decades, and Luhrmann, writing as an anthropologist, offers a model for how psychologists of religion or psychological anthropologists with an interest in religion might attend to context and to culture; (2) the book offers new data about an understudied group or denomination of American Christianity, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship; and (3) the book is distinctive in its analysis in that it offers a reductive yet sympathetic and adaptive interpretation of American evangelical religious experience. To the extent that pastoral theologians are interested in psychology of religion, they will find this book of interest as well. Some limitations of the book are also noted.
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Notes
For autobiographical accounts written by many influential psychologists of religion, see Belzen (2012). These psychologists of religion write about their training and how they came to the field.
The term “psychological anthropologist” recalls the founding of pastoral theology/pastoral psychology as a field or discipline, where a major area of debate concerned whether the field or discipline was grounded in psychology or in theology. The term “pastoral theology” implies that the field or discipline is grounded in theology (or at least that theology has more weight), whereas the term “pastoral psychology” implies that the field or discipline is grounded in psychology (or at least that psychology has more weight) (cf. Dittes 2003).
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Carlin, N. When God Talks Back: Summary and Commentary for Psychologists of Religion. Pastoral Psychol 63, 185–194 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0533-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0533-9