Visions of Daniel
Religion and the Human Sciences
An Approach via Spirituality
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Visions of Daniel
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Religion and the Human Sciences: An Approach via Spirituality. State University of New York Press, 1998. To purchase this book, click here. Proposes a new paradigm for interdisciplinary studies by applying the thought of Bernard Lonergan to define spirituality as the missing link between psychology and theology
Ever since Socrates raised questions about the gods, facets of religion have been branching off and claiming independence. This emancipation process is particularly difficult in the case of the human (or social) sciences, for they deal with the human being, about which religion has much to say. There is little clarity about how these two parties relate.
With a focus on psychology, this book proposes a new approach. Three other approaches are commonly invoked. There is the call for dialogue, but specifying the ground rules for dialogue is precisely the challenge. There is Dilthey's classic distinction between the human or social sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), but this distinction allows that both religion and psychology fall under the human sciences, so specification of the ground rules for dialogue remains the challenge. Finally, there is appeal to the "perennial philosophy," but identifying the divine with the innermost core of the human, it blurs the distinction between theological and social-science matters from the start.
As a methodological study, a companion to The Human Core of Spirituality (SUNY Press, 1996), this book defines spirituality as a human-science specialization intermediary between psychology and theology. This definition provides a new key to the interdisciplinary problematic. Bernard Lonergan's notion of "higher viewpoints," ever expanding horizons of explanation that incorporate one another, is the conceptual undergirding for this new interdisciplinary position. Chapter Two elaborates this position as the book's main contribution. The remaining chapters detail contrasts with those other three approaches. Chapter One analyzes the "integration project" of Evangelical Christianity as an important and sustained instance of the call for dialogue and the theology-versus-religious-studies debate as another expression of the same unsettledness. This initial analysis opens up the questions. Chapter Three treats Don Browning's "revised critical correlation," an elaborate example of the reigning Western approach that surpasses Dilthey's distinction by actually specifying what dialogue must look like. Chapter Four treats Ken Wilber's application of the perennial philosophy, which, with deep roots in Eastern thought, is the reigning paradigm in transpersonal psychology. Contrast with these other approaches serves to highlight their valid contributions, to pinpoint the flaws in them, to explain the source of the flaws and thus to suggest the needed correctives, and in the process to elucidate the interdisciplinary position of this book. The overall argument is that refined attention to spirituality clarifies the relationship between religion and the human sciences, for religion is too undifferentiated a concept to allow for precise interrelationship. This far-reaching methodological study stretches toward a consensus that might structure a global community in the new millennium.
Acclaim for Religion and the Human Sciences: An Approach via Spirituality This brilliant, scholarly and breakthrough book is a tour de force in the solid establishment of a scientific spirituality. Helminiak's encompassing mind, using the complex constructs of Lonergan, frames a vision of a scientific revolution in spirituality and the human sciences. In this process, Helminiak is at his best in a thorough and well balanced critique of the Evangelical integration project of Crabb, the religio-ethical analyses of psychologies by Browning, and the transpersonal psychology of Wilber.
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