Review by Choice Review
Integrating religion, science, and psychology, Jones (psychology of religion, Rutgers) proposes that a religiously lived life is rational, i.e., the religiously lived life has a validity beyond rendering meaning to the adherent. Jones contends that the faith practiced by the devout is grounded in something that exists in reality, and reality cannot be reduced to physicalism. Theology, the insider discipline for practitioners of faith, has not sufficiently employed the empirical data of embodiment and neuroscience or psychological laboratory research. The book's first several chapters survey and deeply explore this data to demonstrate the rationality of the spiritual sense that humans have. The final chapters engage theology and religious studies to propose that "reason is on the side of those who choose a religiously lived life" (p. 3). Jones adds that spiritual and metaphysical writings of guidance for practitioners "contain little reflective analysis." The author returns to the traditional pattern of the ancient theologians, who were both scholars and monastics, theoreticians and devotees. His book ends with implications and suggestions for the application of empirical and qualitative data about religion to the life of practiced faith, contending that one need not live or think in bifurcations of reason and delusion to have a life of the spirit. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. --Merrill Morris Hawkins, Carson-Newman University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
