Material and Spiritual Poverty: A Postmodern Psychological Perspective on a Perennial Problem.

From a social-scientific perspective, this paper addresses an overlooked dimension of material poverty, namely spiritual poverty or the lack of spiritual sensitivity, and calls it a psychological disorder. Religions link deep spirituality with a kind of "poverty," namely simplicity of lifestyle and generosity toward the needy; but none advocates the poverty of outright destitution. A fully psychological "spiritualogy"-built on Bernard Lonergan's analysis of human consciousness or spirit and consonant with the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow and current psychotherapeutic understanding-explains the link between spirituality and poverty as a matter of personal integration and suggests interventions to address the corrosive epidemic soul sickness of the postmodern world, so different from traditional societies in which religion and culture intertwined and functioned effectively.

Whither the psychology of religion: a spirituality-focused discussion of Paloutzian and Park's (2005). Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality.

Presuming Rayburn's (2006: Child & Family Behavior Therapy, 28, 86-92) review of (Paloutzian and Park's, (2005, New York: The Guilford Press) [corrected] Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality [corrected] and sketching an alternative paradigm, this review focuses on the Handbook's virtual conflation of religion and spirituality; relates this conflation to the hegemony of Protestant theology in North American psychology of religion; highlights the Handbook's lack of attention to [corrected] spirituality per se, which--if [corrected] not inseparably linked with theism, but, rather, [corrected] related to the self-transcending, meaning-making dimension of the human mind--could [corrected] provide an explanatory breakthrough in the field of the psychology of religion and of the social sciences overall; and sees Handbook's advocacy for a "multilevel interdisciplinary paradigm" as a regrettable acceptance of the failed, long-term strategy of the field of psychology in general.