psychology Archives - International Society for Science & Religion (ISSR)

May 2026 Blog

The Boyle Lectures and the Brain: Concerns about ISSR’s Public Sphere Claims about Human Minds and Intelligence Michael Spezio, Ph.D., M.Div. Associate Professor, Psychology, Data Science, Neuroscience, Scripps College, Claremont, CA USA Minister of Word and Sacrament, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Presbytery of San Gabriel, Temple City, CA USA The public sphere of pluralistic liberal democracy is in danger of collapse due to sustained attacks on sound, coherent, evidence-based discourse, thinking, and the corrigibility of claims. Anti-vaccine campaigns are reshaping public health. Anti-evolution advocacy is reshaping science education. Climate denial is reshaping energy policy. The institutions themselves are now being directed by commitments that contradict the scientific consensus they were built to apply. None of this is incidental to the work of science and religion. Our field exists, in

What is Wisdom? Voices from Psychology and Christian Faith

Throughout history, one tends to find at least two categorically different ways in which wisdom is understood. These might be described as a wisdom of knowing, and a wisdom of unknowing. In Christian terms, we might call these a cataphatic wisdom, and an apophatic wisdom. A cataphatic wisdom relies on knowledge, texts, and accumulated wisdom – what is known and declared to be known. An apophatic wisdom, which recognises what one cannot know, relies on a direct and open kind of awareness. This is what John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul”, where one leaves one’s knowing behind and plunges into the darkness of the ineffable. The former wisdom relies on longstanding traditions of meaning and knowledge – it represents a tried and