RELIGION AND MENTAL-HEALTH - A HERMENEUTIC RECONSIDERATION

This paper argues that the question of the relationship between religi osity and mental health has been miscast because both religiosity and mental health have been understood in the discipline from a distinctly modernist perspective. This modernist perspective is characterized by a metaphysic of substances and by empiricism, and it insists that all scientifically interesting relationships must be efficient causal rel ationships among substances. From this perspective the only legitimate questions revolve around which way the causal arrow points. The paper argues that this framing of the question and the modernist perspectiv e which gives rise to it fail as adequate accounts of either phenomeno n and, thus, of their relation. Further, in some fundamental sense the perspective fails to take either religiosity or psychopathology serio usly.