ABSTRACT
Many branches of science have had enough of some particular ways of thinking. Developmental psychology, including its literature on religious and spiritual development, is no exception. This branch of science has had enough of stage models describing how highly domain-general aspects of development unfold, whether it be all-purpose cognition as in Piaget’s theory (e.g., 1930), psychosocial adaptation as in Erikson’s theory (e.g., 1997), or any of their multiple applications to religious and spiritual development (for reviews, see Hood, Hill, & Spilka, 2009; Oser, Scarlett, & Bucher, 2007). The problems with these models can be formulated succinctly: Psychological development is never that domain general and rarely unfolds in discrete stages.
