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Cultural psychology and psychology of religion have a good deal in common: being major fields at the inception of psychology, they have become marginalized during the 20th century, but are both returning to the fore in impressive ways. Up to the present, however, they have remained rather distinct fields within psychology. Although there is increasing attention to religion in cultural psychology, the cultural psychological approach is hardly yet applied in psychology of religion.
This book distinguishes different variants in cultural psychology, reviews contemporary research, and proposes to utilize cultural psychological approaches to the study of religion. The book points out the interdisciplinary character of cultural psychology of religion, discusses some current cultural psychological theories and their application to religion, and presents a number of examples from recent empirical research.

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The aims pursued in this book are quite modest. The text is not an introduction in the traditional sense to any psychological subdiscipline or field of application, nor does it present anything essentially new. Rather, it shows ´work in progress´, as it attempts to contribute to an integration of two differently structured, but already existing fields within psychology. In order to explain this, it is probably best to say a few words about how the book came into being and about what it hopes to achieve. As a project, the volume owes very much to others. While lecturing in places ranging from South Africa to Canada and from California through European co- tries to Korea, colleagues have often urged me to come up with a volume on ´c- tural psychology of religion´. For reasons that should become clear in the text, I feel uncomfortable with such a demand. To my understanding, there exists no single cultural psychology of religion. Rather, there are ever expanding numbers of div- gent types of psychologies, some of which are applied to understanding religious aspects of human lives or to researching specific religious phenomena, while others are not. Within this heterogeneous field that is, correctly or not, still designated as ´psychology´, there are also many approaches that are sometimes referred to as ´cultural psychology´ or as ´culturally sensitive psychologies´. It would be wor- while applying many of these to research on religious phenomena, but at present not too many are in fact so applied.

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Principles.- Building Bridges.- A Hermeneutical, Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Religion.- Cultural Psychology of Religion.- The Way Out of Contemporary Debates on the Object of the Discipline.- Approaches.- Methodological Issues.- When Psychology Turns to Spirituality.- The Question of the Specificity of Religion.- A Cultural Psychological Promise to the Study of Religiosity: Background and Context of the "Dialogical Self".- Applications.- Religion as Embodiment.- Religion, Culture and Psychopathology.- Psychopathology and Religion.- Religion and the Social Order.

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Having received several international awards and distinctions, Jacob A. Belzen is one of Europe´s best-known psychologists of religion. As he has obtained doctorates in social science, history, philosophy and sciences of religion, his numerous publications are characterized by a strong interdisciplinary approach. He is a full professor at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). He worked on this book while he was a visiting Fellow at Cambridge University (UK).

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