Fraser Watts is uniquely qualified to write this book. He is currently Starbidge Lecturer in Theology and Natural Science at the University of Cambridge and comes to that post with 25 years experience in psychology, including a long period at the Medical Research Council. He is remarkably well read in both fields and writes with a tough and thorough lucidity. As a theologian reviewing the book, I found his theological probing sensitive, informed, and very carefully thought-through. I am not a trained psychologist, so am not able to comment on the materials from that viewpoint. However, I would register a slight disappointment not to find the Freudian tradition as well respresented, especially through its practioners who do engage with religious themes in a most illuminating manner (Lacan, Irigaray, and Kristeva for example). However, Watts does provides an indispensable guide to both theologians and psychologists on why knowing about each others disciplines and methods will make for richer development and growth when each goes about the task of exploring their routine agendas. For example, theologians concerned with divine action, salvation history and eschatology will listen into, be challenged, and learn from discussions in psychology. We see how conscience is explored through psychology’s understanding of cognitive processes that develop in a hierarchical manner and are socially cultivated. This goes well, as Watts points out, with Aquinas and MacIntyre. There are endless and rich connections. One might say that psychology’s contribution to theology is theologically taking seriously the Word made Flesh. Watts constantly shows that rather than there being a war between science and religion, as propounded by scientists like Dawkins, we can find many areas of mutual illumination and even marriage.

Psychologists are called to take notice of theologians when dealing with their recent curriculum: evolution, neuroscience, and computer intelligence. Watts chapter on the latter was a conversion experience for me, fed previously on mainly theologian critiques of artificial intelligence. Watts is careful never to reduce the disciplines to each other, nor to keep them in boxes tightly and smugly, and his book is a superb illustration of what the Ashgate series hopes to achieve: a flourishing interdisciplinary debate.