Abstract
Psychology has not fully engaged with the possible reality of transcendence, spirit, or the divine, largely due to unexamined assumptions that prevent taking religious experience and transcendence seriously. Eugene Long’s reflections on experience and transcendence, key ideas from hermeneutic philosophy, including Brent Slife’s conception of “strong relationality,” Peter Berger’s analysis of modern dilemmas and “many realities,” Louis Dupré’s discussion of an ingrained “objectivism” that has long colored and probably distorted Western philosophy, theology, and the social sciences, and Vaclav Havel’s suggestion of a “need for transcendence” in a postmodern world roughly cohere and go a long way toward dismantling the “encapsulated self” that must either reject transcendence altogether or reach it only by way of a blind and indefensible “leap” out of the modern situation.
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Notes
Berger is careful to acknowledge the genuine insights conveyed by Kierkegaard and others who may have employed terminology of this sort. He indicates he is referring to a common, he feels inadequate, option adopted by many religious people trying to make sense of faith in a modern context.
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Richardson, F.C. Investigating Psychology and Transcendence. Pastoral Psychol 63, 355–365 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0536-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0536-6