A Down-to-Earth Approach to the Psychology of Spirituality a Century After James's Varieties

Spirituality has recently become a mushrooming topic in psychological circles but, taking its cue from the religions, psychology tends to define spirituality in terms of relationship with God or other similarly conceived, metaphysical, nonhuman entities. Such emphasis on the otherworldly and the extraordinary confuses the psychological enterprise by introducing into it nonfalsifiable, intractable, and incompatible presuppositions. In the spirit of William James and humanistic psychology, this article calls for a more down-to-earth approach to the matter. Building on Bernard Lonergan's analysis of human consciousness or spirit, this article suggests an approach that might account for spiritual phenomena apart from appeal to gratuitous metaphysical presuppositions; potentially ground universally applicable, normative, core beliefs and ethics; and be open to theist extrapolation and other religious applications. Consideration of the implications of such an enterprise draws out the methodological challenges, inherent in a psychology of spirituality, that the field has yet to acknowledge.