Spirituality, culture and mental health: Prospects and risks for contemporary psychology of religion

This paper asks whether: (1) psychology of religion is doing what it is supposed to do, (2) the contemporary psychological attention to religion and spirituality is perhaps of a transgressive nature, and (3) conceptualizations of spirituality in psychological publications are biased. It makes a plea for phenomenologically well-informed research on real forms of religion and spirituality, from a perspective that is as broad as psychology at present has become, with due regard for both the cultural make-up of the phenomena and the unavoidable limits of psychologists' professional competence.