inherently diverse one. But the recentwork of Iain Gardner is rapidly weakeningPearson’s position and supporting Bauer’s.The Manichaeans were the ‘Christians’ ofKellis, before any noticeable orthodoxcomponent arrived on the scene. On thebasis of the Kellis material, Gardner hasbeen identifying more and more of thesupposedly orthodox early papyri as in factManichaean.

Pearson devotes a chapter to the roleof philanthropy in the emergence ofChristianity and makes a persuasive casethat Christian charity was a major factor inits growing popularity. The Christianstook a decisive cultural step in identifyingthemselves with ‘the poor’, breaking withthe prosperity ethic of the dominant classesof Greco-Roman society. Nietzsche saidas much a century ago, and Pearson sup-plies the proof. In doing so, he supports anargument made by Rodney Stark aboutthe forces contributing to Christian successin the Roman Empire. It must be said,however, that Stark’s contention thatChristians already formed the majorityin the Empire by the conversion ofConstantine is patently incorrect andis based upon deeply flawed analogicalmodels rather than upon the historicalevidence.

Pearson concludes with a valuable dis-cussion of method in the historical studyof religion. He defends the ideal of ‘criticalneutrality’ against the aptly labeled ‘intel-lectual auto-eroticism’ of ‘postmodernism’and ‘deconstruction’ (pp. 217, 225). Hezeroes in on the principal dividing pointbetween these interpretive stances:whether one is concerned with recoveringwhat was real and significant historically,or rather is interested in using historicaldata as the raw material of some creativeendeavour. He suggests that a reason thatthe latter enterprise has infected the studyof religion with special virulence is to befound in the character of the field itself.The majority of scholars have been trainedhistorically in seminaries, where theology

and moral application have been inextri-cably mixed with the interest in historicalresearch. Pearson both predicts and hopesfor changes in the field as more of itspractitioners receive training in publicinstitutions, where the bracketing of per-sonal belief opens the door to greaterwillingness to understand the Christianreligion as one among the many religioustraditions of the world, and one with ahistory of competition, engagement,reaction and innovation within that largerreligious environment.

JASON BDUHNUniversity of Northern Arizona

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doi:10.1006/reli.2001.0338, available online athttp://www.idealibrary.com on

Diane Jonte-Pace and William B. Parsons(eds), Religion and Psychology: Mappingthe Terrain. London and New York,Routledge, 2000, xii+340 pp., £50, r85(hardback), ISBN 0 415 20617 0, £16.99,$26.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 415 20628 9.

This is an ambitious collection of essaysthat, as the subtitle indicates, seeks to mapthe entire terrain of the relationship be-tween religion and psychology. To this endthe editors have brought together seven-teen essays specially commissioned for thevolume, which itself is divided into twomain parts. The first part, containing nineof the essays and arranged into three sec-tions, focuses on the psychology of religion,while the second, containing eight of theessays and also arranged into three sections,focuses on religion in dialogue with psy-chology. This twofold division was not, itseems, planned but discovered by the edi-tors when they found that the finishedessays fell ‘almost seemlessly into twomajor enterprises associated with the field’(p. 2). Indeed, the editors make it plain thatthey ‘sought to avoid imposing any con-ceptual schema that might prejudice their[the contributors’] remarks’ (p. 2).

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The primary aim of the volume is tobe as inclusive and neutral as possible,and the editors acknowledge that thecategories employed to arrange thematerial are not the only possible ones.In line with this editorial philosophy,contributors were asked to structure theircomments around one general question,‘What is your perception of the presentstatus of the field and probable paths forits future?’

Such an approach has much to com-mend it, and the reader of this collectioncan certainly look forward to an encounterwith a wide range of often-conflictingviews and agendas. Indeed, I would go asfar as to suggest that everyone with someinterest in this very broadly conceivedfield of ‘religion and psychological studies’will find material to endorse and materialto criticise in this volume. My ownresponse to it was certainly a mixed one,though not just because I liked someof the contributions and disliked others.The invitation to speculate about thefuture development of ‘the field’ seems tohave led some authors to think not somuch in terms of the directions in whichpast and present trends are pointing butin terms of where they think ‘the field’should go. Consequently, a number ofthe contributions offer not so much amapping as a polemic or an apologetic.This approach certainly has a value incontexts where professionals are seeking toinfluence each other about the relativemerits of different lines of enquiry but not,I would contend, in a volume thatpurports to be mapping or outlining adomain of scholarly enquiry.

I also wondered about the ‘neutrality’ ofthe editors’ choice of contributors, as itseems to show a distinct bias towardspsychoanalytical and feminist perspectives.Six of the seventeen authors bring obviouspsychoanalytical or, more broadly, psy-chodynamic perspectives into their essays,and three bring explicitly feminist ones.Since these two approaches can hardly be

claimed to constitute half of the workdone in this area, the collection is clearlyfar from being a representative one.

I found the editors’ decision-makingcontentious for other reasons, too. Thenotion of a broad ‘field’ of psychologicaland religious studies is, it seems to me,misguided. On the one hand there arethose scholars who seek to understand andexplain religious behaviour, belief andexperience as far as possible in psycho-logical terms. On the other are those whoseek to develop some kind of religiouspsychology—psychology in the service ofreligion—or develop a psychologiseddefence of religion to protect it fromcriticisms that are based on psychologicalresearch. We have, then, at least two‘fields’ here, and I for one would like tosee them much more clearly separated.Workers in the religious psychology campmay well be interested in research under-taken by psychologists of religion and maydesire to blur the differences between thetwo groups, and it is easy to understandwhy. The reverse is much less likely to bethe case, however. Why should psycholo-gists of religion be interested in whethertheir research or conclusions are compat-ible with any particular set of religiousbeliefs; why should psychologists of reli-gion be interested in the ways in whichworkers in pastoral care contexts mix psy-chological research with religious notions?I cannot think of any, unless, of course,the psychologist is also a religiousbeliever—in which case there is morethan one active agenda. In short, I wouldsuggest that the editors’ inclusivist agendashould itself be challenged, as it is anexpression of a position that I regard asdetrimental to a sound psychology ofreligion.

Another issue closely related to this oneis that of representativeness. Far too manyof the contributors bring some kind ofapologetic agenda to their work for myliking, and this is just as much in evidencein part one as in part two. In other words,

‘showed a statistically significant effect

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[magnitude unspecified] on standardmeasures of self-actualisation’ (p. 288). Mymind immediately generates questionsabout control groups, but such concernsseem to have no place in Shear’s appraisal.He also appears to think that the meta-analyses showing TM to produce far betterresults than other techniques makes theentire field of research more credible (seep. 287), whereas I would be inclined tosuggest that it should lead us to be extracautious when evaluating studies of TM byTM practitioners or by researchers whoare funded in some way from TM sources.

One could, space permitting, evaluateeach essay in turn, but suffice it to say thatthe reader will not get exactly what thetitle of this work offers, as there are anumber of significant omissions, deficien-cies and biases. It is, like the curate’s egg,good in parts, and those with a less puristagenda for the psychology of religionthan I may well find that the good partssignificantly outnumber the bad.

PETER CONNOLLYUniversity College Chichester

doi:10.1006/reli.2001.0339, available online athttp://www.idealibrary.com on

Steven Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman(eds), Beyond New Age: Exploring Alterna-tive Spirituality. Edinburgh, EdinburghUniversity Press, 2000, vi+266 pp.,£15.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 7486 0998 9.

This is a welcome addition to the growingnumber of worthwhile volumes on newreligions and alternative spiritualities. Theessays, separated (a little artificially) intothree parts, ‘People’, ‘Places’, and ‘Prac-tices’, constitute a balanced collection ofsociological, ethnographical, and historicalstudies by a range of notable scholars,including James Beckford, Steve Bruce,Susan Greenwood, Malcolm Hamilton,Graham Harvey, Paul Heelas, Elizabeth

the collection as a whole is not so muchabout mapping ‘the field’ or fields as aboutpresenting ‘the field’ in a certain kind ofway, a way that I certainly would not wantto endorse. That said, there is much that isgood in this collection, and the book isworth buying for that alone.

The opening essays by Wulff, Spilkaand Belzen are excellent, as are those byParsons and Barnard. Carrette’s offers aninteresting challenge to more mainstreampsychology of religion, though one thatwill be quite limited in its impact since afair portion of the critical psychologyagenda is unlikely to withstand sustainedcritical scrutiny as it is as much driven byideological concerns as the mainstreamthat it seeks to critique. His case is cer-tainly not helped by the inclusion ofalmost contradictory claims like ‘The psy-chology of religion has so far remainedinsulated from the critical registers of post-structuralist theory’ and ‘The psychologyof religion has taken some of the criticalweight of post-structuralism into accountby questioning the relationship betweenpsychology and religion’ (p. 113).

Shear’s essay on ‘Experimental Studiesof Meditation and Consciousness’ is alsowell worth a perusal, though the fact thatit is the only one which addresses psycho-physiological research just serves to under-line my comment about agendas. In myview, there should have been at least twoessays dealing with this kind of material,and they should have approached it fromdifferent perspectives. Shear makes a fairattempt at offering a balanced view ofthe research but his own hopes for itcome through much too strongly for anydiscerning reader to feel confident abouthis conclusions. He wants meditation to begood for us and thus demonstrates a reluc-tance to ask probing questions of theresearch he surveys. For example, hequotes a meta-analysis of forty-two studiesof meditation, relaxation and self-actualisation which reveals that all formsof meditation and relaxation techniques