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Book Review: Spiritual Development: An Interdisciplinary Study

established, M. develops faith and hope as paradigmatic religious experiences in the sense that they enable persons to relate to self, others, culture, and reality generally in more creative and ethically satisfying ways. M. understands faith and hope more as transcendental realities in the sense of Fowler's notion of faith than as theological or confessional realities. Theologians concerned with interdisciplinary conversation with psychology and psychoanalysis will welcome M.'s contribution from both methodological and substantive standpoints. Whether psychoanalysts and psychologists will be equally welcoming will depend on their attachment to the classic Freudian analysis of religion. Moreover, the great variety in contemporary psychologies contextualizes M.'s contribution as but one, albeit an honored, position within psychology and thus as but one partner in interdisciplinary conversation. Still, M.'s book contributes to reflection on religious praxis by providing a coherent psychological description of the effects of grace in human life—a description aligned with contemporary theological attention to historicity, community, and approaches to knowledge that can specify the concrete historical realizations of God's action, yet differentiated clearly from theological or confessional language and agendas. Further work, by M. and by interested theologians, is needed on the societal relevance of psychoanalytical categories—especially in view of the tremendous influence, particularly in North America, of liberation and feminist theologies (rather than the European political-theology position noted in the later sections of M.'s book). Attention to feminist concerns is especially necessary—both as corrective to M.'s exclusivist language and in response to the critique of developmental research launched by Carol Gilligan among others.