Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development

by Eugene Webb

When worldviews clash, the world reverberates. Now a distinguished scholar who has written widely on thinkers ranging from Samuel Beckett to Eric Voegelin inquires into the sources of religious conflict—and into ways of being religious that might diminish that conflict.

Worldview and Mind covers a wide range of thinkers and movements to explore the relation between religion and modernity in all its complexity. Eugene Webb invokes a number of topical issues, including religious terrorism, as he unfolds the phenomenon of religion in all its complications, from the difference between faith and belief to the diversities among—and within—religions.

Building on Karl Jaspers’s psychology of worldviews and Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology, Webb looks at a broad spectrum of religions—especially the history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in their various forms—to explore the subjective factors that sometimes render religions conflictual and aggressive and to consider conditions that might foster more helpful and reconciling forms of religiousness. He explores what psychological analysis reveals about the relationship between stages of psychological development and ways of being religious—ways that range from closed-minded literalism to open-minded tolerance. He also identifies unconscious and developmental obstacles to religious maturity and depicts the mature person as one who participates in the mystery of self-transcending love.

Webb argues that authentic religion need not succumb to dogmatism, or support fanaticism, or be consigned to the stages of immature culture. Responding to critics of religion, from Sigmund Freud to Daniel Dennett, he demonstrates that religious traditions have more spiritual depth than these critics have granted and a greater potential for development than they believe, along lines they might even favor. His insightful book proposes that, if religious people can step back from their traditions and consider them as partial ways of relating to transcendent ultimacy, the world’s religions might manage to develop a way of living together with mutual appreciation and respect.

Genres: Psychology

320 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 2009

About the author

Professor Emeritus Eugene Webb was Professor of Comparative Religion and Comparative Literature and Associate Director of the Jackson School of International Studies at The University of Washington.

Professor Webb is the author of seven books, including two on the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett, as well as The Dark Dove: The Sacred and Secular in Modern Literature (1975), Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (1981), Philosophers of Consciousness (1988), and The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France (1993), World View and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development (2009), and In Search of the Triune God: The Christian Paths of East and West (2014).

Reviews

[Marcas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Webb makes excellent use of his many expertise, in English and Comparative Literature, Religious Studies and International Studies, to create a genuinely inter-disciplinary and high resolution look at religions, levels of consciousness and life's central existential concerns.

Complex ideas from Lonergan, Piaget and others not even translated into English (such as Jaspers) are made intelligible and moving, if at times startling.
By focusing on the clouding effects of our anomie, mimetic desire, etc we are given a more realistic and interesting view of Man and History.

Then, this learned professor takes us on an ascent through the levels of psychological and spiritual maturity. We can do this in part by embracing an ascetic differentiation of consciousness (and other methods of thinking) that allows for a flourishing and authentic human life. This is difficult, as Gene acknowledges and requires the virtue of humility, but offers an honest life where we can become more like wise Eugene, and even Christ Himself.