Abstract
I began to think of myself as a psychologist of religion when I was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago from 1966 to 1970. My location was the Divinity School and, more particularly, in the area called “Religion and Personality.” Prior to my doctoral studies, I had spent the academic year at Yale Divinity School (1965–1966), where I had previously received the Bachelor of Divinity (BD) degree in 1963. I was in the Master of Sacred Theology (STM) degree program. It was during this year that I became interested in the psychology of religion and began searching for doctoral programs in this academic field.
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Notes
- 1.
I discovered Robert Fritz’ (1989) book The Path of Least Resistance after writing this essay. He argues that the life of an individual is like a river in that it follows the path of least resistance; this being the case, the underlying structure of one’s life determines what the path of least resistance will be. Therefore, just as engineers can change the path of a river by changing the structure of the terrain so that the river flows where they want it to go, so individuals can change the very structure of their lives and thereby create the life they desire (pp. 4–5). Some may resonate with Fritz’ engineering analogy, but I tend to go along with these rather more relaxed lines from a poem by William Stafford (1998): “Freedom is not following a river./Freedom is following a river,/though, if you want to” (p. 142).
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Capps, D. (2012). The Path of Least Resistance. In: Belzen, J. (eds) Psychology of Religion. Path in Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1602-9_3
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