Hoedeman Lectures

Reflections on the Psychology of Religion

Randall Hoedeman, Ph.D.

Explores the nature and purposes of our personal and highly subjective psychological "images" and "representations" of God -- those complex mental creations constructed out of the god-materials we have appropriated from each layer of our developmental history and that depict many of our basic intrapsychic, interpersonal, and existential hopes, dreams, wishes, fears, conflicts, and longings.

Introduction and Basic Varieties of Religious Experience
(theism, pantheism and mysticism, atheism, and agnosticism).
Pathological Religious Experience
(the castigated self; hellfire and brimstone; the gods of war).
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
Anchor of Hope
References

Randy Hoedeman is the Director of the Counselling and Psychotherapy program at the Pittsburgh Pastoral Institute. He describes his "credentials" for the topic this way:

"This Psychology of Religion material has been some time in the making. It's been incubating, or gestating, at least since 1973 when, fresh out of college, I went trotting off to seminary idealistially and enthusiastically in search of God and a theological formula for changing the world. Thus far, I have failed miserably at the latter, but did manage to hang around the seminaries long enough to get a Ph.D. in the Psychology of Religion, of all things. Time will tell what you think that has been worth!"