In this thought-provoking book, clinical psychologist and professor of religious studies James W. Jones presents a dialogue between contemporary psychoanalytic thinking and contemporary theology. He sheds new light on the interaction of religion and psychology by viewing it from the perspective of world religions, providing an epistemological framework for the psychology of religion that draws on contemporary philosophy of science, and bringing out the importance of gender as a category of analysis.
Developments in psychoanalysis provide new resources for theological reflection, Jones...

What are the benefits of being a spiritual person? This is the question that James Jones explores in his newest book, The Mirror of God. Jones contends that true religious belief is not a passive process and that one must work hard towards believing in God through acts such as prayer, meditation and communal worship. He explores the boundaries between psychotherapy and religious practice, looks at what Christians might learn from Buddhists and shows their effects on the body and mind. Jones is a psychologist as well as a professor of religion and, ultimately, he provides a blueprint for...

Drawing on the work of various contemporary relational theorists within psychoanalysis, this text develops a psychoanalytically informed theory of the transforming and terror-producing effects of religious experience.

The "New Atheist" movement of recent years has put the science-versus-religion controversy back on the popular cultural agenda. Anti-religious polemicists are convinced that the application of the new sciences of the mind to religious belief gives them the final weapons in their battle against irrationality and superstition. What used to be a trickle of research papers scattered in specialized scientific journals has now become a torrent of books, articles, and commentary in the popular media pressing the case that the cognitive science of religion can finally fulfill the enlightenment dream...