Religious Mourning

"By intricately tracing key sets of conflicts, correspondences, and thematic recurrences, Nathan Carlin offers a moving and insightful collection of portraits of influential religious leaders and the scholars who study them. Working lucidly through a series of comparative case studies, Religious Mourning represents an important contribution to the literary history of religious studies--and, even more suggestively--to the psychology of the psychology of religion."

--Marcia Brennan, Rice University, Houston, TX



"Carlin is an extraordinary addition to scholarship and discussions about the integration of religious and spiritual perspectives into psychiatric and general medical care. Religious Mourning allows professionals from diverse educational formations to appreciate new adverse and adaptive consequences of actual or imagined separation, loss, and transition experiences. Using his ideas to elaborate previous work of psychoanalytic researchers, like Vaillant and Pollock, has enormous potential."

--James Lomax, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX



"Interweaving an analysis of social change and cultural creativity with a reflection on the life and work of three psychologists of religion, Carlin finds patterns of loss and recovery echoing through biographical, intellectual, and cultural realms. Successfully building on psychological and cultural analyses of the ability to mourn, Carlin produces a thoughtful reading of scholarship in religious studies as reversal and restoration."

--Diane Jonte-Pace, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA



"Religious Mourning is a compelling exploration of the intricate ways in which the personal lives of scholars intersect with their scholarship. Nathan Carlin writes with an elegant clarity that invites us to not only explore the lives of Peter Homans, Donald Capps, James Dittes, and William Bouwsma along with their sophisticated and influential scholarship on Sigmund Freud, Jesus, Saint Augustine, and John Calvin, but also to unearth the connections between our own personal lives and our work as scholars of religion . . . Read this illuminating book and be inspired and informed!"

--Lewis R. Rambo, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea