To many, psychology of religion – especially as an academic discipline – is still a rarity. Either it is considered – usually because of theological a priori's – to be an impossibility; or it is regarded as superfluous – often because of personal lack of interest and sometimes even animosity towards religion. On the other hand, there exists outside academic psychology a broad stream of psychology-like approaches to religion and spirituality, contaminating psychology with, or using it on behalf of, religious 'salvation." In a way, even an undertaking like pastoral psychology might come under this label. Although all these psychological and psychology-like approaches are dealing with religion, they are not usually regarded as psychology of religion in the proper sense. The aim and intention of the latter is not salutary: it is more modest and only tries to figure out some psychological aspects of religion (cf. Vergote 1983/1997). (Although this may sound tautological, it has to be hammered away at time and time again.) Psychology of religion as it has developed laboriously but steadily over the last few decades, therefore defines itself as a branch of psychology and orients itself towards the different branches of academic psychology in general (and not, for example, towards theology). Psychology of religion, by consequence, shares much of the fate of psychology in general. Next to benefiting from the strength of academic psychology in general, however, psychology of religion is threatened by the same dangers. The "crisis in psychology," which seems to have been spoken of ever since Karl Bühler's publication by the same name (1927), seems to exist in this subdiscipline of psychology as well. This crisis has been delineated by Amedeo Giorgi (1976) in terms of lack of unity, lack of relevance, and problematic self-understanding as a science. Even if, in a post-modern era, one might be inclined to hail pluriformity in psychology, Giorgi's second and third reproaches still seem to hold. The many lamentations, from various sides, about psychology's restricted value for a fundamental understanding of human beings, its having lost sight of the peculiarities of the individual, its non-generalizability of the results obtained on middle class white students, and many more well known drawbacks seem likewise to pertain to psychology of religion and need not be repeated at length here. In spite of (or perhaps because of) dealing with small-scale questions, concepts and manipulated variables, and in spite of its ever increasing refinement of scales and sophisticated statistical techniques, psychology is criticized for not observing sufficiently, not going deeply enough into, the phenomena it wants to explore, especially not when constructing its "measuring instruments." One of the main reasons for this lack of relevance is, according to Giorgi, psychology's problematic self-understanding. Because it chose to emulate the natural sciences it could not solve this fundamental dilemma: being faithful to the demands of the life-world and not doing justice to science, or remaining faithful to the requirements of science and precisely because of that, not doing justice to the life-world. To Giorgi, phenomena have to be approached as they present themselves in the world and therefore "the kind of science psychology should be must be constructed from within the viewpoint of the "world." For the world of man, psychology must be a human science" (Giorgi 1976, p. 293).