I'm the thinker you know today because of James. For the first ten years of my academic career my research focused on mood disorders. Anger, depression, anxiety. After over ten years publishing empirical research on these topics I began to shift my focus to the psychology of religion. I didn't know much about the field at the time so I started at the beginning. During a Christmas break I read The Varieties of Religious Experience.
I was captivated and began to shift my research projects away from clinical psychology to psychology of religion. I began publishing on the intersections of faith and psychology. Much of it shared on this blog and then finding its way into my early books Unclean and The Authenticity of Faith. I became, quite simply, the person you know today, the psychologist who is called a theologian.
The biggest impacts of James upon me is his focus on religious experience and his pragmatism. James doesn't begin with or focus on creeds, dogma, or metaphysics. The focus is on religious experience, the human encounter with the divine. Recently, that focus has become really important to me as it seems to me, if you've been following my thinking over the last year or so, that in our "disenchanted," secular age many Christians are losing a capacity to experience and encounter God. Faith is increasingly a struggle for many because we're losing touch with the affective, experiential aspects of faith. For many, Christianity is about propositional, metaphysical beliefs (conservative or progressive)--having and keeping "faith"--rather than a numinous, mystical encounter with God.
Intellectual belief in God is important, assenting to ontological propositions (conservative or progressive), but if it's not sustained by a burning bush encounter with the I AM, that faith isn't long for this world.
James' pragmatic approach toward religion has also been impactful. According to the pragmatists, the truth of a religious belief is found in the conduct it inspires and the experience it produces. As I tell my students, when we, as psychologists, approach faith we cannot determine if a belief is true of false metaphysically speaking. But we can ask this question: What sort of human being does this belief produce? And what sort of church?
Because of William James, I regularly ask myself those questions.
