Culture and the Cognitive Science of Religion is the first book to bring together cultural psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Containing much-needed discussion of how good research should do more than simply follow methodological prescriptions, this thought-provoking and original bookoutlines the ways in which CSR can be used to study everyday religious belief without sacrificing psychological science.
Cresswell's pragmatist approach expands CSR in a radically new direction. The author shows how language and culture can be integrated within CSR in order to achieve an alternative ontogenetic and phylogenetic approach to cognition, and argues that a view of cognition that is not based on modularity, but on the dynamic connection between an organism and its milieu, can lead to a view of evolution that makes much more room for the constitutive role of culture in cognition.
As a provocative attempt to persuade researchers to engage with religious communities more directly*,* thebook should be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students, as well as psychologists interested in the cognitive science of religion, theological anthropology, religious studies and cultural anthropology.