Université catholique de Louvain

Faculty Member, PSP

Professor

Psychological Science Research Institute, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences

About

    My undergraduate work was in the field of religious studies, with minors in philosophy and psychology, at Oberlin College (www.oberlin.edu), where Clyde Amos Holbrook had a huge influence on my thinking. During that time I also benefited from a Visiting Scholarship at Union Theological Seminary and The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, where I was fortunate to be included in advanced graduate seminar in political theology with Dorothea Solle and an independent study with the feminist scholar, Carol Christ.  Raymond Brown's course on the Gospel of Matthew influenced my thinking about biblical scholarship. My undergraduate honors seminar paper was "Images of Women in the Literature of Soren Kierkegaard".
    I then went to Harvard (www.harvard.edu) and Pennsylvania (www.upenn.edu) where I was trained as a developmental and clinical psychologist, in neo-Piagetian, phenomenological, and neo-psychoanalytical, especially object-relations, traditions, influenced by major figures with whom I worked; Lawrence Kohlberg, Erik Erikson, John Schlein, Peter Kuriloff, Elisha Babad, Richard Bocchini, amongst them. 
    I am a certified trainer in the Tavistock Method for Group Work from the National Training Laboratoy, and hold a post-graduate diploma in theology, from the University of Cambridge (www.cam.ac.uk).  Prior to taking the chair I hold at Louvain, I held a post at Boston University, where I was Assistant, then Associate, Professor. 
    In addition to my academic work, I am a licensed, practicing, psychologist, at PsyGroup, in Brussels, and an ordained priest in the Church of England, Anglican Communion, serving in the Pro-Cathedral of The Holy Trinity, Brussels. Since 2005 I have been Visiting Preacher in The Memorial Church, at Harvard University, and a regular speaker on the Faith in Life Forum, at Harvard.

My current research is in the field of moral decision-making and moral action, and more particularly, how religious elements function in the definition and resolution of moral dilemmas.  I try to hold together cognitive-developmental and constructionist traditions, having been influenced in recent years by the turn to narrative approaches in psychological science, and friendship with constructionist thinkers such as Kenneth Gergen, Sheila McNamee, and John Rijsman. I am an Associate of The Taos Institute, the constructionist think tank.

At present, my projects include a focus on cognitive complexity, religious cognition, and moral decision making, in collaboration with Michael Commons, at Harvard Medical School, with whom I enjoy an official research partnership, using the Model of Hierarchical Complexity to think about how people come to manage increasing numbers and orders of variables in complex decision-making situations, and how religious elements contribute to, or hinder, an appreciation of irony, paradox, and self in relationship to the authority of others. A lecture on this topic, given at a Metanexus Institute-Templeton Foundation congress, in Madrid, can be viewed here: http://vimeo.com/9714899.

I am also doing research on how god images, at least in some cases, change, in psychotherapy, and how, in this way, the "space-in-between", from early childhood onwards, takes on the qualities of a "transcendent third" presence, exerting influence on how we feel, think, and act.  Thinkers and clinicians such as Christopher Bolas, and friends and colleagues Michael Briant and James W. Jones  are sources of encouragement in this work.

At Louvain I am a member of the Human Development Laboratory, and the Psychology of Religion Research Center. I am Co-Editor of the Archive for the Psychology of Religion: The Journal of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion, member of many review and editorial boards,  In the course of my career I have been a visiting lecturer and visiting scholar at Cambridge, Columbia, Cornell, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Paris, Porto, Princeton, and other universities, and have completed additional study at Yale.

http://vimeo.com/9714899

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