The author discusses spirituality as a human phenomenon that is independent of, yet open to, matters of personal religion and belief in God. Although commonly expressed through religion and theist belief, the author views spirituality as a universal mental phenomenon with an inherent “normativity”; it can, therefore, be legitimately addressed as a prescriptive aspect of psychology apart from theology and religion. An elaborated psychology of spirituality helps therapists focus the psychotherapeutically relevant and spiritual issues in the client's presentation; build on the client's healthy commitments; and reinterpret or deflect the unhealthy and, thus, foster the client's personal integration and, ipso facto, the client's spiritual growth.

The pervasive inclusion of God or "God-substitutes" (the "sacred," the "supernatural," the "ultimate") in the psychology of spirituality prevents the development of a truly psychological understanding. Misidentification of the spiritual with the divine projects the determinants of spirituality into a non-human, vaguely defined, ultimately intractable, and non-falsifiable realm. Two other difficulties follow: confusion about the essential nature of spirituality and indeterminacy regarding criteria to adjudicate true and false spiritualities. These three intertwined issues represent unavoidable challenges for the social sciences in general and psychology in particular. Building on the work of Bernard Lonergan, invoking the thought of Viktor Frankl, and citing long-standing Western theological and philosophical principles, this article elucidates these challenges and intimates a response, an explanatory and normative non-theological psychology of spirituality, which is open to theological elaboration.

I take the APA publication A Spiritual Strategy for Counseling and Psychotherapy (Richards and Bergin 2005), along with a devoted issue of Journal of Psychology and Theology (Nelson and Slife 2006), as a paradigmatic example of a trend. Other instances include the uncritical use of "Eastern" philosophy in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology, almost normative appeal to the "Sacred" within the psychology of spirituality, talk of "God in the brain" within neurological research, the neologism entheogen referring to psychedelic drugs, and calls for new specializations such as neurotheology and theobiology. In response to the legitimate ethical requirements of respect and openness regarding clients' religious worldviews, the trend is to make God an essential component in psychological theory. The argument is that God is active in the universe and especially in human affairs to such an extent that any accurate account of strictly psychological matters, not just a comprehensive, interdisciplinary purview that could include a distinct theological dimension, must include God as an explanatory factor. Less nuanced than standard theological thought about divine intervention-including a range of opinions from supernaturalism, to occasionalism, to providential and deistic naturalism-this trend would blur the epistemological differences between religion and science by appeal to claimed knowledge sources such as inspiration and revelation and thus undermine the achievements of evidence-based science and establish particularistic religious beliefs as standard explanatory accounts. The concern to include a spiritual, in contrast to a religious or theist, dimension in psychological theory is welcome; but elaborated approaches, such as my own and those of Roberto Assagioli, Viktor Frankl, and Ken Wilber, open to varied theological applications, already exist. 47

This article responds to 3 response articles and, discerning fundamental and deeply felt differences of opinion, notes in the articles (a) insistence on importing religion into psychotherapy, (b) serious misunderstanding about the proposed psychology of spirituality, (c) argument primarily by appeal to authority, and (d) a remarkable amount of imprecision and ad hominem comments. Specifically, R. E. Watts (2001) confounds religion and spirituality in championing clients' spirituality; B. D. Slife and P. S. Richards (2001) curiously argue that all psychotherapy is theological and, to this extent, is immune to criticism; and A. Marquis, J. M. Holden, and E. S. Warren (2001) uncritically embrace Eastern metaphysics, which ultimately disqualifies Western psychological concern for evidence and conceptual coherence. Offering clarifications, this article suggests that the target article deserves further consideration.

I challenge the psychology of religion to move beyond its merely descriptive status and, by focusing on spirituality as the essential dimension of religion, to approach the traditional ideal of science as explanation: a delineation of the necessary and sufficient to account for a phenomenon such as to articulate a general "law" relevant to every instance of the phenomenon. An explanatory psychology of spirituality would elucidate the scientific underpinnings of the psychology of religion as well as that of the social sciences in general, all of which grapple with the issues of human meaning making. Three prevalent and debilitating errors preclude that achievement: (1) the confounding of the spiritual and the divine and the importation of "God" into psychology, (2) the uncritical association of any spiritual phenomenon with spirituality, and (3) the attempt to eschew value judgments from the study of religion and spirituality. To confirm the possibility of avoiding these errors in the face of radical postmodernism, I build on Bernard Lonergan's analyses of intentional consciousness, or human spirit, and thus intimate a psychology of spirituality that is fully nontheological and potentially explanatory. Keywords:consciousness; definition of spirituality; God and social science; Bernard Lonergan; nature of spirit; psychology of religion; psychology of spirituality; sui generis nature of religion; value-free and value-laden science.Religion and spirituality have recently become respectable topics in psychology. In