Looking Back and Finding Our Way Forward: An Editorial Call to Action

摘要

A longstanding issue in the psychology of religion and spirituality is the lack of any consensual definition of the numinous. Everyone seems to have their own ideas about what spirituality and religiousness are, and freely use them in their research in ways that do not promote connection, convergence, and cumulativeness across studies. This inability to clearly operationalize what is, and what is not, a spiritual or religious construct creates a significant vulnerability for the field that will undermine our efforts at becoming an applied discipline. This editorial issues a call to action for researchers to move more aggressively at using rigorous quantitative methods and philosophical discussion to bootstrap an empirically sustainable, consensual definition of the numinous that can be clearly linked to mainstream psychological models. This journal will provide a forum for the publication of this research and the interpretive dialogue it generates.