The International Association for the Psychology of Religion (IAPR) is an international organization promoting scientific research and exchange within the field of the psychology of religion. The Association is not partial to any particular trend but aspires to provide a platform for the entire spectrum of the scientific-psychological study of religion for psychologists of religion from all over the world.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The International Association for the Psychology of Religion (IAPR) has European roots. The Association was founded in 1914 in Nuremberg, Germany, as “Internationale Gesellschaft f\u00fcr Religionspsychologie” and published in that same year the first volume of the “Archiv f\u00fcr Religionspsychologie” (now\u00a0Archive for the Psychology of Religion<\/a>). Already at this early stage, a number of international scholars, including some from the USA, belonged to the board of both the association and the journal, while the key figure of the enterprise was Wilhelm St\u00e4hlin (1883\u20101975), a German protestant minister. As Germany went to war during 1914\u20101918, the interior situation of the country changed dramatically and a next volume (No. 2\/3) of the\u00a0Archiv<\/em>\u00a0was not published until 1921, to be followed by a Volume in 1929.<\/p>\n St\u00e4hlin, in 1927 handed over both the Association and the\u00a0Archiv<\/em>\u00a0to Werner Gruehn (1887\u20101961), a Lutheran pastor from the Baltic countries, who in later years became a professor of theology at Berlin. Before the war, Gruehn managed to publish two more volumes of the\u00a0Archiv<\/em>\u00a0(no. 5 and 6). But then things definitively went wrong: in 1945, Gruehn had to flee from Berlin, lost his professorial position, and needed to live on a moderate pension in a small town in Germany. In fact, the Association and the\u00a0Archiv<\/em>\u00a0were extinct. In the fifties, Gruehn tried to organize an international congress to revive the Association, but failed.<\/p>\n At the beginning of the 1960s, Wilhelm Keilbach (1908\u20101982), a professor of Roman Catholic systematic theology who had a strong interest in history of religions, expressed the wish to reactivate the Association. He organized some ‘Tagungen’, small conferences, to which only a limited number of people were invited, essentially pre\u2010war students and friends of Gruehn, and Keilbach’s own priest\u2010students. The papers read at the conferences were printed in the irregularly published\u00a0Archiv<\/em>, which now functioned in this way, more as proceedings than as a journal.<\/p>\n Although people like Andr\u00e9 Godin, Antoine Vergote and especially Hjalmar Sund\u00e9n published some articles in the\u00a0Archiv<\/em>, the Association after some years ended in a cul\u2010de\u2010sac again. There were only a few professional psychologists involved, most attendees of the conferences had limited training in psychology during their pre\u2010war education as theologians. No efforts were made to broaden up, to professionalize or to modernize the Association’s perspective or style.<\/p>\n When the Board even opposed all forms of modernization, this unfortunate development eventually led to the formation of a new, more progressive and active group, the\u00a0European Psychologists of Religion.<\/em>\u00a0Nils Holm, a historian and psychologist of religion from Finland, who was chosen as its new President in 1995, managed to persuade the ‘old’ majority within the Board to take in some new persons at a conference he organized in Denmark, 1998. Together with the small number of psychologists of religion already on the Board, these new members were committed to a reorganization of this Europe\u2010based Association, in order to turn it into a scholarly, democratic, and confessionally as well as religiously neutral international platform for the psychology of religion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Please visit the IAPR homepage www.iaprweb.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The International Association for the Psychology of Religion (IAPR) is an international organization promoting scientific research and exchange within the field of the psychology of religion. The Association is not partial to any particular trend but aspires to provide a platform for the entire spectrum of the scientific-psychological study of religion for psychologists of religion … Continue reading “About IAPR”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-10","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P8cJJD-a","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.norway2017.iaprweb.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.norway2017.iaprweb.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.norway2017.iaprweb.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.norway2017.iaprweb.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.norway2017.iaprweb.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.norway2017.iaprweb.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":589,"href":"http:\/\/www.norway2017.iaprweb.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10\/revisions\/589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.norway2017.iaprweb.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}