james e. dittes: a professional portrait

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Pastoral Psychology [pspy] ph216-pasp-470334 September 22, 2003 16:24 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 52, Nos. 1/2, November 2003 (C© 2003)

James E. Dittes: A Professional Portrait

Donald Capps1,2

A portrait is a representation or description of a person. A professional is a personwho does something with great skill, but embedded in the word professional isanother word—pro-fess—which means to make an open declaration of or to affirm.A professor, then, is a person who openly declares his or her sentiments or beliefs.Thus, in titling this “a professional portrait,” I signal my intention to representwhat many others besides myself have perceived in Professor James E. Dittes: aperson who professes with great skill his sentiments and beliefs.

KEY WORDS: psychologist; ministry studies; psychology of religion; men’s issues; pastoralcounseling; editor.

This portrait is necessarily partial and incomplete. His faculty colleagues arein a much better position than I, or any of the other contributors to this special issueof Pastoral Psychology, to provide an account of his professional contributions tothe life and mission of Yale University. An outsider can note his official positions(Professor in the Divinity School, the Psychology Department, the Department ofReligious Studies), but only an insider would be able to represent the person whopoured himself into these positions. The same limitation applies to his roles of hus-band, father, and son. An outsider can note the fact that he has been all three, butonly those who have known him as husband, father, and son would be able to rep-resent this dimension of his personhood. Also, because he did not have a doctoralprogram of his own, there is no cadre of doctoral students to honor him with a tradi-tionalfestschrift. No portrait, however, can capture the living reality or authenticityof its subject, so one does the best one can with the resources at his command.

This, then, is a portrait of James E. Dittes drawn largely from my habit ofreading much of what he wrote near the time of its publication, from the year when I

1Donald Capps is William Harte Felmeth Professor of Pastoral Psychology at Princeton TheologicalSeminary.

2Address correspondence to Donald Capps, Princeton Theological Seminary, P.O. Box 821, Princeton,NJ 08542-0308.

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0031-2789/03/1100-0017/0C© 2003 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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took courses from him as an S.T.M. student (1964–1965), from the few years whenwe overlapped as participating members in the Society for the Scientific Study ofReligion, and from our collaboration on several writing and editing projects towhich I will refer later. In the midst of all this, a transition from a professor-student relationship to a collegial relationship occurred, and the fact that it was soeasy and natural is itself testimony to his ability to be what others need him to be.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND

James E. Dittes was born December 26, 1926, in Cleveland, Ohio. TheGerman town, Dietelheim, bears the family name. He was the only child of Merceinand Mary Dittes. His father, who owed his first name to the fact that his motherread French novels while raising a family of six as a single parent, dropped out ofhigh school to become a carpenter. He was a junior high teacher in industrial artswhen Jim was growing up. As a teenager, Jim and his father built a new familyhome singlehandedly one summer. His mother, born Mary Freeman, was of En-glish background. She was a soloist in the choir of a Baptist Church in Cleveland.So, despite the fact that he was probably baptized in a Presbyterian Church, heattended the Baptist Church through much of his childhood and adolescence.

It has probably occurred to the reader of the above paragraph that aDecember 26 birthdate, a mother named Mary, and a father whose professionwas carpentry would send a powerful message to a young boy that he was predes-tined to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. That the “voice” he heard in church eachSunday was not the authoritative thunderings of a pastor father but the hauntinglybeautiful voice of a much-loved mother may also have led some readers to predict,had they known him then, that he would become what hedid become, one whomade a profession (in all senses of the word) of the ministry of care.

In his senior year of high school, he applied to Yale and Oberlin colleges,and was admitted to both. The school principal and other teachers urged him toaccept Yale, and expressed considerable disappointment when he opted insteadfor Oberlin, largely owing to its geographical proximity to his home in Cleveland.He began studies at Oberlin in 1944. Then, after a year of college, he enlistedin the United States Navy and was a radio technician on a tugboat in the SouthPacific from January 1945 through August 1946. When the War ended, he returnedto Oberlin in 1946 and graduated in 1949 with a B.A. degree. His undergraduatemajor was in English and American literature, but he took a course in his senioryear in psychology on human motivation. This course stimulated his interest inpsychology.

From Oberlin he went directly to Yale Divinity School, enrolling in the fallof 1949. His interest in psychology grew during his first year of study, and hebegan taking courses in psychology of religion from Hugh Hartshorne, who wasResearch Associate in Psychology of Religion. Hartshorne was best known for his

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collaboration with A. Mark May on moral character and values, which resultedin a three volume work titled,Studies in the Nature of Character(1928–1930).When the academic year ended, Dittes took a position teaching science to middleschool boys in a missionary school in Talas, a remote village in central Turkey.During the two years he worked in Turkey, he read all the psychology books thathe could get his hands on from a library in Ankara established by the U.S. StateDepartment. Thus, while he had been introduced to psychology at Oberlin, andtook several courses from Hartshorne, much of his immersion in the world ofpsychology occurred while living in a country far removed, both geographicallyand culturally, from his own.

During the time that he was in Turkey, he missed being in an academicsetting. So, toward the end of his service there he applied for admission in graduatestudies in psychology at Yale and was admitted, largely on the strength of hisGRE scores in psychology. He began his Ph.D. studies in the Fall of 1952 whilecontinuing to take courses in the Divinity School, dividing his course work in thetwo programs more or less equally over the next two years. He received his B.D.(the professional degree that has since been replaced by the M.Div. degree) in 1955.In 1954, Hartshorne retired. Dittes was invited to teach in his place the followingyear while he continued his doctoral studies in psychology. He had completed twoyears of the Ph.D. program when he began teaching at Yale Divinity School, andwas awarded the Ph.D. in 1958. He was initially appointed an Assistant Instructorof Psychology of Religion and thus began a teaching career at Yale that spanned47 years (1955–2002). From 1955 to 1968 he moved steadily through the ranksof Instructor, Assistant and Associate Professor, and became Professor in 1968 atthe age of 42. When he became a full professor with tenure, he was appointed tothe Department of Psychology and the Department of Religious Studies. He wasDirector of Graduate Studies in the latter from 1969 to 1975, and intermittentlyfrom 1985–2001, and Chair of the Department from 1975 to 1982. In 1984 hisposition was renamed Professor of Pastoral Theology and Psychology, and in 2001was retitled Roger Squires Professor of Pastoral Counseling.

While engaged throughout the 1950s decade in becoming established profes-sionally, he was also involved in the creation of a family. Married from 1948 to1983 to Frances Skinner Dittes, he became father to four children in the space offive years. Larry, the first and only son, was born in 1953. Three daughters, Nancy(born in 1954), Carolyn (1956) and Joanne (1958) followed. Nancy is manager of aresearch project at the University of Connecticut Medical School on the incidenceof breast cancer; Carolyn is a campus minister at Harvard University, and Joanne isa consultant to nonprofit organizations on public relations and fund-raising. Larrywas born with Down syndrome. At a time when parents were encouraged to placetheir Down syndrome babies in institutions at birth, Larry lived at home. In 1959, atthe age of six, he died from heart complications related to his congenital condition.Not much given to book dedications, Dittes broke form with the publication of

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The Male Predicament, which is dedicated to his father Mercien and his son Larrywith these words: “We never had the chance to say these things to each other.” Hewas married to Margaret House Rush from 1984–1986, and has been married toAnne Hebert Smith from 1987. She is a therapist and dancer, and has a privatepractice in dance therapy. Together, they have conducted workshops and retreats,joint marriage counseling, and co-taught courses on gender issues and pastoralcounseling. His most recent book,Pastoral Counseling: The Basics, is dedicated,“For Anne, extraordinary witness.” He was diagnosed in 1994 with Parkinson’sDisease, which has resulted in some awkwardness in muscle coordination, espe-cially in his speech, but he continued to teach courses and seminars through Springsemester, 2002, his 47th year of teaching at Yale University.

BECOMING A PSYCHOLOGIST

In his doctoral studies in psychology, Dittes was influenced by and guided inhis studies by John Dollard and Neil Miller, two of Yale’s most highly regarded pro-fessors and co-authors ofPersonality and Psychotherapy(published in 1950). The“psychological perspective” of his first book,The Church in the Way(1967), is “ablend of many elements,” among them his use of Dollard and Miller’s “restatementof some of the mechanisms of personality with the precision of ‘neo-behaviorism’and with the social awareness of ‘ego psychology.’ Particular use is made of theiranalysis of conflict and of ‘cue-producing responses’” (p. xi). His doctoral disser-tation, “Effect of Changes in Self-esteem Upon Impulsiveness and Deliberation inMaking Judgments,” was advised by Leonard Doob (Chair), Arthur R. Cohen andGeorge Mahl.

As the bibliography that appears at the end of this special issue ofPastoralPsychologyindicates, Dittes’ publications from 1956 through 1964 were predom-inantly based on empirical (often laboratory) research and appeared in psychologyjournals, most notably theJournal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. Whilereaders of this journal may find their titles somewhat off-putting, closer inspectionreveals their concerns with themes that were later to find their way into his writingson ministry: self-esteem, vulnerability, ambiguity, threat, failure. Some of thesestudies were based on experiments conducted during regular class meetings in hiscourses at Yale Divinity School.

His article, “Impulsive Closure as Reaction to Failure-Induced Threat” (1961)is illustrative of the issues that concerned him at the time, and of the sheer creativityof his research designs. The issue with which he was concerned in this study wasthe observation that in “confronting diffuse, disorganized, and ambiguous pieces ofinformation, persons vary in the way in which they impose conclusions, patterns,or meaning,” and they “vary not only in the nature of the closure they impose,but also in their readiness to impose closure at all. Given a particular series ofstimuli, some persons form a closure readily as best they can with the available

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information, and others tend to defer judgment, leaving the stimuli ambiguous untilmore information is available” (p. 562). Generally, “a moderate delay in closureis more adaptive and produces a higher quality closure than does an impulsivejudgment” (p. 562).

He hypothesized that failure in an ego-involved task would produce moreclosure than either success or failure in a non-ego-involved task, and that personswith lower self-esteem and who are therefore presumably seeking whatever defen-sive supports may be available are more likely than persons with higher generalself-esteem to resort to closure. A detailed description of the research design isunnecessary here. But, essentially, the first step involved all fifty-seven DivinitySchool students taking portions of the Space Relations Test, a test that is abstractenough to allow it to be represented as measuring anything, thus providing oppor-tunity for the ego-involvement manipulation. That is, some students were informedthat the test measures skills of abstraction that are “of central importance in almostall occupations, especially in the professions” and is “highly related to personaleffectiveness and professional success” (p. 564). Other students were informedthat the test is “valid in predicting success with only two occupations—stagehandsand certain kinds of architects,” but they were being asked to answer the questionsbecause “the average level of performance” among those taking the test might beuseful to know for “exploratory purposes” (p. 564). The Space Relations Test wasused because it is sufficiently difficult so as to prevent those who take it from hav-ing subjective certainty about the quality of their performance. The first group ofstudents comprised the “ego-involved” group, the second the “non-ego-involved”group. Interestingly enough, the actual performance of the students who had beenassigned to the non-ego involved group was significantly superior, presumablyindicating “the fruits of their more relaxed approach” (p. 564). While this findingwas not directly germane to the study, I suspect that it was one of the germinatingseeds for Dittes’ subsequent writings on men as workers.

Students did their own scoring of their tests, but the keys and norms weremanipulated so that some students believed they were very successful while othersbelieved that they had failed. Several weeks prior to the experiment, students hadcompleted a self-rating scale designed to establish their general self-esteem leveland the value they placed on personal achievement. Following their self-scoringof the “results” of the Space Relations Test, all students were presented with a“parable,” a single paragraph story “written in Biblical idiom and represented asa portion of a recently discovered scroll” (p. 564). They were asked to write theiropinions concerning the meaning of the parable: “It was essentially incoherent andunstructured, but it contained a large number of familiar religious symbols thatcould, with some selection and distortion, be forced to yield a coherent meaning,though no two subjects ever found the same meaning” (p. 565). The originalparable is not included in the article itself, but appears in the appendix of Dittes’doctoral dissertation. While I have not seen it myself, he recently “improvised” a

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comparable parable to spare me the trouble of digging up the original one:

Some shepherds were in the fields by night, and even while they watched, steadfast andamazed, clouds arrived to veil the stars. Mary was startled by the size of the crowd that wasthere, but she continued to draw water from the family well, bucket by bucket. On the otherside of the boat both fisherman waited. . . .

Judges rated the students’ responses on the parable task on a three-point scale,according to whether each was a positive statement of its meaning or indicateduncertainty as to its meaning.

The results confirmed the original hypotheses. Students who experiencedego-involved failure were more impulsive on the parable task—that is, made morepositive statements of meaning—than those experiencing success, and the studentswho experienced failure and had generally low self-esteem tended to exhibit moreimpulsive closure on the parable task than those who experienced failure but hadhigher self-esteem. Unlike a previous study, “Effects of Changes in Self-EsteemUpon Impulsiveness and Deliberation in Making Judgments” (1959), this oneinvolvedanonymousfailure, yet the outcome was the same. He concluded: “To seekout closure impulsively as a compensating source of self-esteem, then, becomes adefensive maneuver induced by the threat or damage experience. Finding certaintyand clarity is necessary, and when self-esteem is threatened, this defensive devicemay be called upon, if circumstances provided opportunity” (p. 567). He notes,further, that the closure in the case of the parable task may be understood as“achievement closure,” as it involved “the experience of producing for oneselfclear cut cognitions and solutions out of obviously initial ambiguity. . . The parabletask tends to present a challenge to the subject to see whether he can discover andfashion clear meaning” (p. 568). Students most vulnerable to the success-failureexperimental manipulation were those low in self-esteem and high in valuation ofachievement.

Contemporary readers of this synopsis of his impulsive closure study mayreact with consternation to the fact that it involved several “experimental manipu-lations.” When I described John Darley and C. Daniel Batson’s “Good Samaritan”experiment on the Princeton Theological Seminary campus (Darley and Batson,1973) to him in a recent conversation, he responded, “Sounds manipulative tome.” But to me, Dittes’ article was a godsend at the time, as it said to me that myvocational indecision—my difficulty in achieving “closure” in regard to a careerchoice—was o.k., for the “evidence” in support of one or another choices wasinsufficient at that point for me to make a definitive decision. That “closure” couldbe a “defensive support” was also an important new idea for me. The fact thatstudents in the non-ego-involved (and thus more relaxed) group did better thanthe ego-involved also dovetailed with a sentence in Erik H. Erikson’sYoung ManLuther(1958) that I had recently underlined: “Many individuals should not do thework which they are doing, if they are doing it well at too great inner expense”(p. 220).

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No doubt, the thought that Yale Divinity students found meaning in a mean-ingless parable also elicited a sense of vindication from one who had viewed thetheological certainty of many of his B.D. classmates with amazement and, nodoubt, a measure of contempt. That these may also have been students who werelower on self-esteem did not, as I recall, affect my sense of satisfaction. It wasmuch later, when I was involved in the study of narcissism, that I recognized therelationship between a defensively grandiose self and an underlying fragility ofself (cf. Capps, 1993). In any event, that this study involved “experimental manipu-lations” was not nearly as significant to me at the time as the fact that it was dealingwith issues that were vitally important to me, was intellectually creative, and, in itsown way, pinpricked the pomposity that often infects a theological faculty, demon-strating that students can see as much meaning in a concocted fragment from animaginary “recently discovered scroll” as they might, for example, perceive in anequally incoherent biblical passage or incomprehensible theological text.

LEARNING FROM CARL ROGERS

Dittes’ first courses at the Divinity School were psychological and focused onissues of repression, displacement, resistance, and other psychodynamic themes.He also inaugurated courses devoted to pastoral counseling. In 1958 he spentseveral weeks in Chicago in order to familiarize himself with the client-centeredapproach to psychotherapy of Carl R. Rogers and his associates at the University ofChicago Counseling Center. Rogers had just left Chicago, but left behind severalclose disciples who were most hospitable to Dittes. He was viewed as a verywelcome ally because he had just published an empirical study confirming theefficacy of a therapist’s “acceptance.” While there, he stayed in a guest room atChicago Theological Seminary, which is located across the street from the maincampus of the University. It turned out that he alternated with Anton Boisen, whoused the same guest room on his visits to the Seminary from Elgin State Hospital.His assigned course readings and writings throughout the years demonstrate hisrespect for Rogers. InThe Church and the Way(1967), he identifies Rogers asanother major contributor to the psychological perspective of the book: “FromRogers comes the confident understanding that persons have available far moreresources for healing and maturation than most of us suppose and that they canuse these resources when provided circumstances of support and freedom” (p. xi).

Conversely, Rogers paid him the compliment of citing the study noted above,titled “Galvanic Skin Response as a Measure of Patient’s Reaction to Therapist’sPermissiveness” (1957), in his address on the characteristics of a helping relation-ship to the American Personnel and Guidance Association in 1958. This addressbecame a chapter of his influential book,On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’sView of Psychotherapy(1961). Rogers cited this study to make his case for thedelicacy of the therapist-client relationship. Using a physiological measure, the

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psychogalvanic reflex, to measure the anxious or threatened or alerted reactions ofthe client, Dittes had found “that whenever the therapist’s attitudes changed evenslightly in the direction of a lesser degree of acceptance, the number of abruptGSR deviations significantly increased,” suggesting that “when the relationship isexperienced as less acceptant the organism organizes against threat, even at thephysiological level” (in Rogers, p. 44). Furthermore, the “psychogalvanic reflex—the measure of skin conductance—takes a sharp dip when the therapist respondswith some word which is just a little stronger than the client’s feelings. And to aphrase such as, ‘My youdo look upset,’ the needle swings almost off the paper”(p. 54). Rogers relates these research findings to his effort to create a nonthreaten-ing therapeutic environment: “The desire to avoid even such minor threats is notdue to a hypersensitivity about my client. It is simply due to the conviction basedon experience that if I can free him as completely as possible from external threat,then he can begin to experience and to deal with the internal feelings and conflictswhich he finds threatening within himself ” (p. 54).

Dittes’ appreciation for Rogers’ client-centered approach to counseling wasreflective of a larger trend in seminary instruction and (presumably) ministerialpractice focusing on pastoral counseling. He recently noted, however, that therewas little discussion of this (or any other) matter among leaders in the field ofseminary teaching. His own concern was to provide ministers of congregationsresources for counseling their own people. In fact, he addressed an early meetingof the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC), which was organizedin 1963, and said that an association for the promotion and certification of pastoralcounseling specialists was “a bad idea.” Nor was he much enamored of ClinicalPastoral Education (CPE).

INVOLVEMENT IN THE SOCIETY FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDYOF RELIGION

The professional organization that claimed his interest and support at the timewas the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. When it began in 1951, theSociety was regarded as a discussion and support group among persons, largelyin theology and philosophy faculties, who had an interest in social scientific per-spectives usually not shared by colleagues on their own faculties (Dittes, 2000).This was several years before the Supreme Court would hand down the decisionthat opened the way for the founding of departments of religious studies and tothe inclusion of religion as a specialty in sociology and psychology by permittingstudy “about” religion in public universities. It met semi-annually in faculty clubsat Harvard and Columbia, and even after ten years, attendance was typically nomore than two or three dozen persons.

Having presented a paper in the fall of 1957 and served as program chair in1959, Dittes was recruited, at the instigation of one of the Society’s founders, as its

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secretary, which he upgraded to Executive Secretary. He served in this role from1959–1964, as Treasurer in 1964–1965, as Journal Editor in 1966–1971, as Pres-ident in 1972–1973, and as a member of the governing council from 1973–1977.Thus, the organization was a major part of his life for two decades. The programbook announced that his presidential address at the annual meeting of the Societyin San Francisco in 1973 would be, “When Idols Crumble: The Art and Agony ofDisengagement.” The actual address turned out to be a meditation on “How theWizard of Oz Changed Don Quixote into Paul Revere.” It was a brilliant, icono-clastic performance that auditors Erik H. Erikson and Andrew Greeley, also knownfor their iconoclasm, warmly applauded. But the original theme of disengagementwas prophetic, as the address hedid give was upsetting to more than a few of theSociety’s regulars, and he chose not to submit it for publication in the Society’sjournal (the only presidential address not published after it became a tradition todo so). When I recently asked him for a copy, he informed me that it no longerexists.

In his role as Executive Secretary he developed what might today be called“marketing strategies” that led to a dramatic increase in membership. As journaleditor, he played a major role in the development of the Society into an importantintellectual force in the sociological and psychological study of religion. Thejournal was also the major product that attracted new members. As editor, hewould occasionally write editorial comments on articles published in the journal,raising questions about their research methodologies or theoretical assumptions.

Challenging Typologies

As his editorship came to a close in 1971, an important article of his ownappeared in the journal. This article, “Typing the Typologies: Some Parallels inthe Career of Church-Sect and Extrinsic-Intrinsic” (1971), explored the theoreticalsimilarities between the extrinsic-intrinsic distinction between forms of religion,a distinction recently promoted by psychologist Gordon W. Allport and his as-sociates, and the church-sect distinction already prominent in the sociology ofreligion. Historically rooted in the work of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, con-temporary proponents of the church-sect distinction included his own colleaguesat Yale Divinity School, H. Richard Niebuhr and Liston Pope.

Noting that these constructs share “a heavy contraband load of value judg-ment that simply will not be sloughed off” and “a formal untidiness,” he suggeststhat “these two characteristics (value judgments and conceptual sloppiness) areunderstandably related with each other: they both occur because the developersof the typologies have been principally concerned about the purity of religion,not about the purity of concept” (p. 375). Thus, the “formal properties of bothtypes” are “notoriously unsuited for many of the scientific tasks to which theyhave subsequently been assigned,” but they “are admirably suited” to express the

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concerns “for the purity and social efficacy of religion” that first evoked them(p. 375). The intrinsic-extrinsic distinction, with various refinements and modifi-cations, has been the most prominent conceptual model in empirical psychology ofreligion in the decades since he wrote this article. Its proponents have recognizedits “conceptual sloppiness” and taken steps to deal with this problem, but theyhave not taken much account of its “heavy contraband load of value judgments,”or of the larger context in which Dittes sought to locate the distinction itself, “theiroriginators’ philosophical struggle with the relation between the historical and thetranscendent” (p. 375).

Dittes did not himself become involved in this research program. His “Typingthe Typologies” article and his essay “Beyond William James,” published two yearslater (1973), indicate that he was more interested in pointing out the conceptualproblems that attend any typology, however descriptively useful it may be. Havingnoted in the earlier of these two essays that these typologies are more valuable forthe concerns they express about “the purity and social relevance of religion” than asconceptual models for empirical research, he makes the point in his James essaythat although James is noted for his typology contrasting “the healthy-minded”and “the sick souls,” James viewed this typology as heuristically useful only. Hecites James’s own observation (in a footnote in the concluding chapter ofTheVarieties) that because the way each individual handles “the consciousness ofevil” (the primary basis for distinguishing the two types) are “matters of amountand degree,” it is usually “quite arbitrary whether we class the individual as aonce-born or a twice-born subject” (1902/1982, p. 488). Dittes concludes: “Thesetypes are important, but they are important for the representations they give intheir chapters of the philosophy-spirit-method approach of James to the study ofreligion. And it contradicts that spirit with ironic severity to wrest these types outof context and try to discover how religious persons or experiences can be sortedinto one type or the other” (pp. 299–300).

Opposing Sociological Sectarianism

If he had difficulties with the intrinsic-extrinsic typology employed bypsychologists, Dittes was even more critical of 1960s sociologists who were us-ing the church-sect distinction to voice jeremiads against what they perceived tobe theology’s “sell-out to cultural accommodation” (1971, p. 382). The sameyear thatThe Church in the Way(1967) was published, Peter Berger’s 1966presidential address to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion appearedin its journal (1967). In his “Typing the Typologies” article, Dittes describes thisaddress as a “thundering expression of the tradition of church-sect analysis. The-ology’s sell-out to cultural accommodation (under such guises as ‘relevance’ and‘translation’) evoked impassioned lament” (p. 382). Because “this theme—loyalty

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to the transcendent and scorn for all the immanence the sociologist can discern—has pervaded” Berger’s writings from hisNoise of Solemn Assemblies(1961) toRumor of Angels(1969), this “is as good a warning as any of the durability of thismode of thought, for Berger has made it clear—in the same presidential address, forexample—that he is not to be numbered among the traditional religionists. Never-theless, all the evidences of accommodation become, for him, not interesting socialprocesses (as one might expect for a sociologist) but evidence of a repugnant anddeplorable contamination” (382).

Dittes was certainly no proponent of “relevance.” After all, the first chapterof The Church in the Wayis titled “The Relevance of Being Irrelevant.” But hemistrusted the sectarian impulse behind Berger’s and other sociologists’ call fora de-secularized (read “purified”) church. A similar view to Berger’s, he felt, is“implied in the attitude of the minister who sharply distinguishes all the adminis-trative and organizational activities from his ‘pure’ or ‘true’ ministry (which maybe variously defined as preaching, study, community leadership, pastoral care,etc.). He resents the former because they keep him from the latter. Or, at best, hetolerates the former as an evil necessary to permit the latter” (p. 9). This attitudebetrays a Gnostic-like, dualistic way of thinking in which the “daily activities ofthe church and minister” are disparaged “as preliminary and superficially remotefrom the grander activities of the ‘real’ ministry” (p. 10).

How did Dittes come to have a respect for, though certainly not a slavishattachment to, “the machinery and structures of the church” (p. 10)? I believe itderived in large part from his involvement in the machinery and structures of theSociety for the Scientific Study of Religion, first in his position as its executivesecretary, then as the editor of its scholarly journal. The “sectlike character” of theSociety in its early years was reflected in the fact that applicants for membershipwere screened by one of its founders, Walter Houston Clark, “with an eye onscholarly credentials” (Dittes, 2000, p. 428). But under his own tenure as ExecutiveSecretary (1959–1965) the Society experienced its “principal time of growth.”Through “systematic national recruiting, buying mailing lists from psychology,sociology, and other organizations, membership rose from 300 to approximatelyits present size of around 1,500” (p. 428). As journal editor from 1966–1971,he took it from a semi-annual publication for which articles were solicited to aquarterly journal of international reputation with an abundant supply of submittedmanuscripts.

Of course, some of the original members longed for the days when arrange-ments for meetings were “spartan and casual.” He recalls: “There was considerablepride about this minimal structure–it was part of our self-image as scholars and areminder of the initial informal and closely personal intent of the group” (p. 428).Yet, Allan Eisler, the Society’s “most outspoken champion of the spartan val-ues and sect-like style” of the Society in its early years was also among thosesociologists who “have long since explained about churches” that “evolution to

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more formal and elaborate structure was inevitable” and it “was also, probably,inevitable that it be painful and conflicted” (p. 428). Thus, his own involvementin the Society during this period of transition from “sect-like” to “church-like”afforded invaluable insight into the very issues with whichThe Church in the Waywas principally concerned. It taught him that jeremiads that excoriate an inevitableevolutionary process are less than helpful, especially if they substitute rhetoric forstudy of the actual effects of this process.

Analyzing Augustine

An account of Dittes’ involvement in the SSSR would not be complete withoutmention of his participation in a symposium on Augustine’sConfessionssubse-quently published in the Society’s journal in 1965–1966. The symposium includedessays by David Bakan, Walter Houston Clark, Joseph Havens, Paul Pruyser, PhilipWoollcott, and Dittes. As two of these authors (Dittes and Bakan) were my pro-fessors, and I became well acquainted with a third (Pruyser) during my own in-volvement in the SSSR, it meant a great deal to me that all three had written essayson Augustine. These three essays, both individually and collectively, providedvalidation for the approach to psychology of religion that was most congenialfor me.

His essay, “Continuities Between the Life and Thought of Augustine” (1965),was the first assigned reading in a course I took from him in 1964. This course,more a seminar, met in the Yale Divinity School basement. It invited us to akind of theological work that some, accustomed to the theology “upstairs,” foundrisky and alien, but others found enormously liberating. By exploring the life ofa Wesley, St. Teresa, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, or Newman (to name just a fewof the figures we students chose to consider—even the freedom to choose forourselves was a new experience), we discovered that their theological convictionswere forged in personal life experiences, often puzzling, painful, or even traumatic.This “basement theology” (as we came to call it) was one of personal involvement,as we used our own life experiences to explain (and perhaps defend) our choice of“subject” and our interpretations of the subject’s life experiences.

Dittes begins his article by identifying some key elements in Augustine’stheology, and then seeks to account for why these particular ideas had specialappeal for him. He surmises that their appeal had much to do with Augustine’sown personal history, since he grew up in a cultural milieu which afforded agreat many options, and considerable freedom of choice. (Ironically, one of hisown enduring legacies has been that of limiting these options and the individual’sfreedom to choose.) Dittes identifies a common theme in these theological ideas,one that is also discernible in Augustine’s personal history. This is the dilemmaof autonomy v. dependency, and is traceable to his relationship to his mother,on whom he felt very dependent but from whom he also struggled for freedom

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and independence. Throughout his twenties, as he chose his own religious faith(the Manicheans), pursued a career and sustained a marriage, his behavior waspredominantly oriented to autonomy, but with a strong conflicting undercurrentof dependency needs. With his conversion to his mother’s Catholic faith in hisearly thirties, he relinquished his bid for autonomy, and acquiesced to his needsfor dependency.

The theology that issued from this capitulation to his dependency needswas essentially a theology of dependency, with God exercising all initiative, thechurch vested with all authority, and the human self having no independent free-dom or initiative, and no personal influence on the means or process of grace.Thus, his theology served the very essential task of insuring that his autonomyvs. dependency conflict, once formally resolved in favor of dependency, wouldremain forever resolved. As his autonomous strivings reasserted themselves in thepost-conversion period, he relied upon his theology, especially his theologicalaffirmation of the authority of mother church, to enforce this resolution. For agroup of students who were all in their early-to mid-twenties, this essay was farmore “relevant” than any of the neo-orthodox, philosophical, or even politicaltheologies being touted upstairs, for autonomy v. dependency was also our per-sonal dilemma, as was, for many of us, its parental locus.

TESTING CANDIDATES FOR MINISTRY

At the same time (1960s) that he was becoming deeply involved with theSociety for the Scientific Study of Religion, Dittes was also engaged in discussionsrelating to the use of psychological tests for screening candidates for ministry.In the same way that he had challenged psychologists of religion to considerthe “philosophical struggles” behind the extrinsic-intrinsic typology, he expressedgrave reservations about the indiscriminate use of psychological tests for screeningministry candidates. In his view, some crucial elementary questions about suchtesting had not yet been satisfactorily answered.

In “Some Basic Questions About Testing Ministerial Candidates” (1970b) hecalled for a moratorium on testing until these questions had been addressed. Henoted: “The use of tests generate a momentum which may make it necessary forsomeone deliberately to blow a shrill whistle and ask for a time-out for elementaryreflection” (p. 3). Why it gains such momentum is itself an interesting but alsovital question to ask. He identifies two reasons for this: “There is, first of all,the mystique of numbers and of science which too often, in our earnest, evendesperate desire for more reliable information about students, makes us attributeto test scores a kind of esoteric authority in which we forget to ask too carefullywhere the numbers came from” (p. 3). Secondly, “there is the massive investment oftime, energy, money, even careers and reputations involved in the testing enterprise.Even when the investments are initially intended to be exploratory and tentative,”

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they tend “to breed supporting conviction about the validity and worth of whateverone has committed time and effort to. So tests readily have their advocates andtheir willing consumers” (p. 4). His primary objection to such indiscriminate useof psychological tests is their use in screening candidates either for admission toa seminary or for ordination upon completion of seminary training: “Even if testscan measure and predict health and stability, this hardly provides any basis forpredicting who will become a good clergy [person]” (p. 5). In cases where thisproblem is recognized and test results are only one of many considerations or areused not for selection but only for counseling and vocational decisions, there isstill the danger that they will influence smaller decisions and actions which maybe just as decisive in the long run.

While raising these issues, Dittes was also involved in the development of theTheological School Inventory (TSI), the first instrument designed specifically forcandidates in ministry. As he explains in the same article, “The TSI provides anobjective and ordered record of a student’s own statement of his [or her] motivationsfor being in ministry. It belongs most closely to the family of interest tests. . .andits only claim to validity is that the scores correspond to the student’s own self-perception. It is intended to be primarily a kind of mirror or guide, to be an adjunctto vocational counseling” (p. 24). He agreed to write the manual for the TSIwhen he was assured by the Educational Testing Service, which had undertaken todevelop an admissions test for divinity schools and seminaries parallel to tests formedical and law schools, that the test would be conceived as an aid for vocationalcounseling and not for screening. He contended, and ETS agreed, that the useof such testing for admissions or screening was fraudulent, because no adequatecriteria relative to screening had been identified, nor had a connection between suchcriteria and test scores been demonstrated. He did note, however, that “the facevalidity” of the TSI “has been moderately extended by both theoretical reasoningand empirical evidence to show some relation with criteria such as persistence inseminary and subsequent decision concerning vocational assignment [that is, thetype or form of ministry that the student voluntarily selected]” (p. 24). To illustratethe former—persistence in seminary—I have used the TSI scores of first-yearseminary students to identify those who are likely to feel that they do not reallybelong in seminary. I have invited these students to participate in an informaldiscussion-support group so that they will feel less isolated and alone during theirfirst year in seminary. This would be a use of the TSI that Dittes would endorse,as it falls under the broad heading of “vocational counseling.”

Another facet of Dittes’ investment in the vocation of ministry was hisco-authorship with Robert J. Menges ofPsychological Studies of Clergymen:Abstracts of Research(1965). Consisting of abstracts of over 700 studies, this in-valuable text provided a bibliography for those interested in the rapidly expandingbody of research on the psychology of the clergyperson. It divided these stud-ies into the following major categories: the unique personality characteristics of

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seminarians and clergy, the effectiveness of clergy, the differences among clergy,and the consequences of engagement in ministry. The latter was concerned withmatters of role conflict, psychological pressures, and pastors’ susceptibility tomental illness. Studies assessing psychological testing were also included.

BOOKS ON CHURCH AND MINISTRY

Dittes’ first book,The Church in the Way(1967), was written when he wasin Rome on a Fullbright appointment and Guggenheim fellowship. As indicatedearlier, it has a psychological perspective comprising a blend of several elements.Besides those already noted, a Freudian psychodynamic understanding of person-ality is also involved, for the central thesis of the book—that “the resistance whichseems most to thwart ministrymaybe the best occasion for ministry” (p. vi)—is“borrowed directly from the concept ofresistancein psychotherapy, as this is un-derstood by the psychoanalytic approach to therapy” (p. x). Reflecting his mistrustof efforts to classify or, worse, pigeon-hole, he suggests that in terms of “the distinc-tions by which libraries and curricula, authors and teachers are usually divided,”his book might be seen “as an application ofpsychology of religionto problemsof pastoral theology” (p. x). If so, the reader should not look for any discussionof, say, Freud’s (or any other psychologists’) views on religion in general, or whatwas deemed at the time to be pastoral theology’s special forte, that of theologicalanthropology (or “the doctrine of man”). Rather, his focus was the church and,more centrally, what its socio-theological critics, like Harvey Cox (The SecularCity), Peter Berger (The Noise of Solemn Assemblies), and Gibson Winter (TheSuburban Captivity of the Church) were saying about its contemporary expression.

While Dittes’ application of the concept of resistance to ministry is too richand fruitful to summarize here, I cannot resist (!) relating a personal story thatillustrates the concept all too well. Having completed a summer unit of CPEbetween my junior and middler years at Yale Divinity School, it occurred to methat I might use it to waive out of the required course in pastoral care and counselingso that I could take a course in ethics (a newly acquired interest). So, I made anappointment to see Professor Dittes as I would need the instructor’s approval. AfterI made my case, he surprised me by informing me that the faculty was discussingsome curricular changes and it was more than likely that the course would not berequired by the time I planned to graduate. I said something about being willing totake my chances, thanked him, and headed for the door. What I did not anticipatewas that he would follow me and say that if I ever wanted to talk about anything,I should not hesitate to make another appointment. Two years later, when I was inmy first year of doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of California inBerkeley, and had come to the conclusion that many of the philosophical issuesthat were being discussed in classes and seminars were inherently psychological,

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I recalled his invitation, and wrote to the admissions office at Yale Divinity Schoolfor an S.T.M. application form. When I returned there the next fall, I signed upfor his course in pastoral care and counseling. In a few short weeks, I had learneda new concept—resistance—to interpret my earlier visit to his office. My secondvisit to his office was for the purpose of asking him if he would serve as advisorof my S.T.M. thesis.

Two shorter books,Minister on the Spot(1970a) andBias and Pious: TheRelationship Between Prejudice and Religion(1973b), followed. AfterMinisteron the Spotwas published, faculty colleagues begged him to resist the urge to em-ploy wordplays in his titles.Bias and the Piousmay be viewed as a countermove:“They didn’t say anything about rhyming.” All three titles, though, reflect hisrecognition of the paradoxes inherent in the church as institution, ministry, and thepeople of God. Recognizing that such paradoxes reveal ambivalences, dilemmasand conflicts (both internal and external), he resisted the urge to manage or oth-erwise reduce their ambiguity and complexity, and warned of the consequenceswhen strategies and procedures designed to negate these paradoxes are favoredover efforts to understand their existence and persistence.

Minister on the Spotwas a companion volume toThe Church in the Wayinthat it focused on the predicaments of being a minister when the people both doand don’t want to be the church.When the People Say No(1979) may be viewed,at least superficially, as a very condensed version of hisThe Church in the Way,for the same theme of resistance (the “no” in the title) is central here. But evenapart from its length, most readers have probably found it to be a more accessiblebook. This is perhaps because it presents the minister’s relations with the peopleas more companionable, and the people as less obdurate and as more vulnerablethemselves. This does not mean that their “no” is any less real or insistent. Butit doesmean that their “no” derives more from their own experiences of brokencovenants and unrealized hopes than from the need to sabotage. This book alsolooks more deeply into the minister’s own “no” to ministry, and thus recognizes thefact that minister and laity are more alike than different as far as their resistancesare concerned. In his chapter, “Lost Sheep at Grace Church Day-Care Center,”he presents the picture of a minister who openly acknowledges the “no” withinhimself and thereby creates an opportunity for mutual sharing in which his “no”blends with the teachers’ “no.” Thus joined, they enter into a mutual ministry toone another based on their common awareness (“me, too”).

ARTICLES IN PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION

At the same time that he was writing books on ministry, he was continuing towrite important articles on psychology of religion, including his frequently citedarticle on research on variables in religion in theHandbook of Social Psychology

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(1969); the essay on William James noted earlier (1973); and an essay on theinvestigator as an instrument of investigation for a collection of essays on Erik H.Erikson (1977).

I would like to describe his essay on Erikson as investigator because it tellsus a great deal about how he understoodhimselfas an investigator. He identifiesfour different modes “by which the personal reactions of the investigator . . . doand do not become part of his [or her] investigation” (p. 353). In theincongruentmode, the investigator’s reactions to the object of investigation are suppressed.In the introductorymode, they lead to the investigation (that is, they are a majorfactor in the decision to investigate the object in question). In theinstrumentalmode, the investigator’s involvement is an intrinsic part of the investigation. In theinflatedmode, the investigator’s personal involvement dominates the investigation.Consistent with his earlier support for William James’s view of his own typology ashaving heuristic value, not some sort of ontological status, he immediately makesthe disclaimer that this “is, of course, a rough typology and rougher labeling, nosooner done than needing refinement” (p. 352). But it serves to make a case for theinstrumentalmode, to identify Erikson’s study of Gandhi as illustrative of it, andto contrast Erikson’s methodology with that of Robert Coles, Robert Jay Lifton,and the sociologist Robert Bellah.

He begins his discussion of Erikson’s instrumental mode of investigation bynoting that Erikson “devoted the first 100 pages of his book on Gandhi [1969]telling us much about himself and his involvement with the study of Gandhi.”This, he suggests, “is an important methodological discussion which, in somerespects, might be regarded as a postscript to [Erikson’s] book on Luther [1958]and perhaps as a rejoinder to some of the methodological critics of that book”(p. 364). It was as if Erikson had countered, “Alright, if you think the facts on ahistorical figure like Luther become too elusive and too garbled for psychologicalaccuracy, I will take a more contemporary figure and consult the archives andinterview eye-witnesses. But notice how the archives tell us more about the whimsof the archivists and eye-witnesses tell us more about themselves than either cantell us about our subject. And notice especially how the personal involvement ofthe investigator becomes apparent in the proceedings, the closer they are lookedat” (p. 364).

Regarding the investigator’s personal involvement, Dittes takes particularnote of how Erikson’s own experience of interviewing mill-owner Ambalal pro-vided insight into Gandhi, who led a worker’s strike against Ambalal’s mill at anearly period in his career. A stubborn and shrewd interviewee, Ambalal’s behavior“could have proved an annoyance and frustration for a more determined objectivepursuer-of-facts; Ambalal’s tactics threw up impediments in the search for accurateinformation, an impediment some historians would say would only be compoundedif they admitted their own feelings of annoyance” (pp. 364–365). Instead, Eriksontuned into these feelings and thereby discovered more about Gandhi’s experience

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in leading the workers’ strike against Ambalal’s mill than could have been gar-nered from inducing Ambalal to yield a few more facts. Erikson “discovered whata stubborn and shrewd antagonist Gandhi had been coping with, and therefore,presumably also, something about the stubbornness and shrewdness Gandhi musthave had to bring to the encounter” (pp. 364–365).

For Dittes, however, an even more compelling example of the instrumentalmode is Erikson’s 25-page “Dear Mahatma” letter” that erupts mid-way in thebook: “In this scathing, affectionate outburst, Erikson lets his own feelings towardGandhi explode. They are complex feelings, full of admiration, especially forGandhi’s high principles, and full of despair and scolding, especially for Gandhi’ssabotage of these principles in his personal life” (p. 365). To be sure, Erikson“seems to represent this letter as a catharsis, getting these feelings out of the wayof subsequent study of Gandhi,” as though it serves the purpose of enabling himto avoid theinflatedmode of investigation where the investigator’s involvementdominates the investigation. But Dittes asks readers to test for themselves whetherthey do not know Gandhi “more fully and more accurately through this 25-pageemotional outburst by the author” than they do “from the other hundreds of pagesof cooler analysis” (p. 365). Nor would “Erikson have left the passage at the heartof the book, however cathartic it may have been, if he thought it did not also yieldunique insight of a significant order” (p. 365).

Dittes was writing here of Erikson’s mode of investigation, but throughoutthe essay he assesses the four modes of investigation by means of a personalillustration, his own conversations with a man who had written him, telling ofseveral mystical experiences and asking if he was interested in hearing more aboutthem. Several conversations followed. His critiques of theincongruent, introduc-tory, and inflatedmodes are embedded in his discussion of how he might haveapproached and viewed these conversations with Mr. M., and his endorsement ofthe instrumentalmode is reflected in the five full pages he devotes to this illus-tration following his discussion of Erikson’s study of Gandhi. Here, he centers onthe way in which he tuned into his own feelings of protectiveness toward Mr. M.,even as Erikson tuned into his feelings of annoyance toward Ambalal and his morecomplex feelings of admiration and despair toward Gandhi.

I will not try to summarize Dittes’ reflections on how his discovery of hisown feelings of protectiveness led to insights about Mr. M. and his religious ex-periences. But it is noteworthy that he does not view theinstrumentalmode asany less “scientific” than theincongruentmode—-where the personal emotionsof the investigator are suppressed—which is often touted as the scientific ideal(objective, rational, etc.). In fact, he contends that Erikson’s and his own use ofthese “affective impediments” is “the practice already demonstrated by the mostalert scientists, who have always been ready to be open and curious about theunwelcome artifacts intruding into their laboratories. Pavlov’s initial studies ofsalivation were considerably inconvenienced, for example, by the bad habit thedogs got into, of salivating prematurely, as soon as the experimenter appeared and

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before he produced the meat. So Pavlov decided to study this inconvenient andintrusive bad habit” (p. 370). It would be a mistake, then, to assume that Dittesrepudiated his earlier training and experience as an experimental psychologistwhen he embraced Rogers and Erikson. Put another way, they were no less sci-entific than the “neo-behaviorists” with whom he had trained and worked in the1950s.

BOOKS ON MEN

If When the People Say No(1979) was the culmination of more than a decadeof books on ministry,The Male Predicament: On Becoming a Man Today(1985)inaugurated a decade-plus of books on men. But this transition from ministry tomen was quite accidental. He originally intendedThe Male Predicamentto beabout the predicament of ministry. It was therefore continuous in his mind with hisearlier books. There are unmistakable echoes, for example, in his exploration ofthe story (John 5:2–9) about the man who lay beside the pool for thirty-eight yearsin “Crippled Cripplers” (chapter 5) of “38 Years on the Verge,” the introductorychapter ofMinister on the Spot. Also, the story of Moses’ call (Exodus 3:1–6)explored in the “Who Am I That I Should Go” chapter ofMinister on the Spotis carried forward in “Confessions of the Golden Bull” (based on Exodus 32),the third chapter ofThe Male Predicament. Interestingly enough, the back coverof Minister on the Spotavers that the book “is a penetrating, yet sympathetic andconstructive inquiry into the gutpredicamentsof being a minister” (my emphasis).Thus, predicament (which the dictionary says implies “a complicated, perplexingsituation from which it is difficult to disentangle oneself”) was extended to applyto “becoming a man today.”

The editors at Harper & Row, who asked him to make it a book on men’sexperience, were, no doubt, influenced by the marketing possibilities afforded bya recasting of the book as a contribution to “men’s studies.” I suspect though, thattheir proposal was based on a true insight, namely, that he had written a book thatderived at least as much from his own personal experiences of being a man as fromhis experiences of teaching and guiding future ministers. An earlier indication ofthis personal involvement (the instrumental mode) in his writings about ministers isthe poignant introductory chapter, “Ministry as Grief Work,” inWhen the PeopleSay No,” especially the section, “Acquainted with Grief. . . .” that begins withillustrations of personal grief and then, ever so smoothly, segues into illustrationsof ministers’ experience of grief in the everyday conduct of ministry. In effect,TheMale Predicamentreversed the process.

As I was unaware that he had originally intended to write another book onministers, the assumption with which I readThe Male Predicamentwas that hehad intentionally joined the ranks of those who were writing on men’s issues. Thisassumption, which was incorrect, was accompanied by another assumption that

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wascorrect, namely, that he would not have written a book on men merely to scorea few points against feminist writers.

The dustjacket describes the author ofThe Male Predicament“as a compas-sionate, supportive, and helpful companion to men struggling to find truer waysof being who they are.” This portrayal is reminiscent of Carl Rogers’ well-knownappropriation of Soren’s Kierkegaard’s claim that the aim of life is “to be the selfwhich one truly is” (1961, pp. 163–182). But Dittes would no doubt object to theadjective “helpful” in the above description, as his chapter on “Crippled Cripplers”has some rather critical things to say about men who become skilled at helpingothers: “Physician, clergy, father, lawyer, psychotherapist, husband—all of these,all of us, define our roles in terms of the helping paraphernalia we offer, the tech-nology of crippling: ‘Here’s what I will do for you because you can’t or you won’tor you don’t do it for yourself, or you bungle if you try”’ (p. 127).

The chapter that exerted the greatest emotional pull on me, however, wasthe first chapter, “Joseph: Frozen Power,” where he presents a poignant accountof having been chosen by Miss Gardener and Miss Swearer, who produced theChristmas pageant the year he became a teenager, for “the lead role,” only todiscover that, as Joseph, his only instructions “were simple and absolute: don’tmove!” (p. 3). This story of expectant promise turning into helpless paralysiscalled to mind a favorite poem by William Stafford, “Vocation,” in which the poetdescribes himself standing between his two parents, “helpless, both of them partof me” (1998, p. 102). But the story itself set me off on a personal search for thehelpless boy inside of me who had tried to make the best of similarly paralyzingcircumstances. As I should have known, this boy had a great deal to teach me about“being a man today.”

There was also, for me, the important fact that young Dittes became Josephbecause two well-intentioned women believed they were paying him a great honor.Anyone can be a shepherd, but only one can be Joseph. He does not say that theywere surrogate mothers to him, but he does say that they taught him how to do it justright, adding: “Though their script was only one of many in a boy’s life, not eventhe first, not even the most rigid, it was a clean and spare script, pure manliness, astaught by women—which is how most of us have learned it” (p. 3). This accountof his having been scripted through the encouragement and teachings of womenprovided the germ of an idea that I developed into my own books on men,Men,Religion, and Melancholia(1997) andMen and Their Religions: Honor, Hope,and Humor(2002).

There was also, relatedly, the litany in the final section of this chapter—“ToBe Joseph Or Not to Be”—that was reminiscent of a similar litany, noted earlier, inthe “Ministry as Grief Work” chapter inWhen the People Say No. Only this litanyalternates between experiences of having been a boy and experiences of being aman and shows through these examples that, as the saying goes, the boy is fatherof the man. What lessons do we derive from these examples? That to be Joseph

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is “to yearn for the richness and color and depth of life which you know is yournatural birthright and a God-given promise” but “to be assigned, instead, a task,a fixed role” which you adopt as your own, as expressing who you are. Then youdevise ways to sustain it by enticing others into the script implied by your role andassigning them their corresponding tasks and fixed roles, and “bringing vigor andenergy and imagination into protecting those roles” from “the erosion and ravagesof that rich birthright of life” which remains “your treasured promise” (p. 29). Ifthis sounds circular, it is.

With the publication ofThe Male Predicament, Dittes became one of themajor voices among seminary and religious studies professors who were writingat the time about “men’s issues.” Yet, even as he had not intended to write abook on men, so he never joined a men’s group or became involved in the “men’smovement.” He was, it seems, a somewhat reluctant recruit, and his voice wasmore valuable and distinctive because of this. He did, however, host the “men’sissues” conversation at the annual meeting of the Society for Pastoral Theologywhen it was in its infancy.

Shortly afterThe Male Predicamentwas published, he accepted an invitationto write a book for a projected series on men to be published by WestminsterPress. HisWhen Work Goes Sour: A Male Perspective(1987) inaugurated theplanned series. But the series never materialized, so his book became somethingof an orphan. Yet, if any book on men could be expected to stand on its own, it isdifficult to imagine a better one, for what topic is more central to men’s lives thanthat of work?

The preface introduces the central claim of the book, which is that “Men’smost intense love affairs are often with work. As with other love affairs, the experi-ence is sometimes joyous, sometimes devastatingly disappointing. As in other loveaffairs, we often expect a fulfillment never attained. As in other love affairs, we of-ten discover our ardor unrequited or our commitment one-sided” (p. 7). Then, too,“Men’s most intense religious commitment is often to work. We give it absolutedevotion, and we expect our work to save us, to make us feel whole and healthyand right, cured from the gnawing sense that there is something wrong with us”(p. 7).

To say that he is not one to clutter a text with bibliographic references, foot-notes, and even indexes is an understatement. I believe, though, that one can seethe influence of Freud and James—and a creative tension between them—in thearresting trinity of work, love, and religious devotion that centers the book as awhole. When asked what he thought a normal person should be able to do well,Freud surprised his questioner with the short, laconic reply, “To love and to work.”Erik Erikson takes this to mean that one’s work “should not preoccupy [him] to theextent that he loses his right or capacity to be. . .a loving being” (1962, pp. 264–265). But Dittes gives Freud’s comment an ironic twist that Freud himself wouldhave greatly appreciated: “But what if a man’s workis his love? What then?”

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If the themes of work and love derive from Freud, the theme of religiousdevotion is prefigured in the very first sentence of James’s chapter on “Conversion”in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “To be converted, to be regenerated, toreceive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phraseswhich denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, andconsciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right,superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities”(1982, p. 189). To be sure, James does not discuss work as an aid or means towardthe realization of conversion or regeneration. But in his essay, “The Gospel ofRelaxation,” he had noted that “It is your relaxed and easy worker” who is “quitethoughtless” of the “consequences” of his work “who is your efficient worker; andtension and anxiety, and present and future, all mixed up together in our mind atonce, are the surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success”(1899/1992, p. 833). The same emphasis on “taking it easy” reappears in hisportrayal of religious conversion as “the surrender of the personal will, as if anextraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession” of oneself (p. 228).Thus, when Dittes discerns that men have “an intense religious devotion” to work,he is not so much critiquing the devotion itself, but how men go about expressingthis devotion, and what they believe it will do for them.

He also seems to subscribe to the view of work that Erikson promotes inYoung Man Luther. Erikson asks: How could Luther possibly have been opposedto all work—as his supporters sometimes claim—when God became for him “whatworks in us” (p. 213)? True, “Luther was against works, but very much for work”(p. 220). This is reflected in Luther’s attitude toward his own work, for only whenLuther “was able to make speaking his main occupation could he learn to know histhoughts and to trust them—and also trust God. He took on the lectures, not withpious eagerness, but with a sense of tragic conflict; but as he prepared and deliveredthem, he became affectively and intellectually alive” (p. 230). Erikson declares,“This is not works; it is work, in the best sense. In fact, Luther made the verbalwork of his whole profession more genuine in the face of a tradition of scholasticvirtuosity. His style indicates his conviction that a thing said less elegantly andmeant more truly is better work, and better craftsmanship in communication”(p. 220).

When Work Goes Sourstands in the same tradition as James and Erikson in itsunderstanding of work. This is reflected in the fact that the first three chapters centeron men’s unrequited love affair with work, the ironic take on Freud’s famous “Tolove and to work” statement, while the last two chapters focus on the conversationthat is, in effect, a change in self-perception from “I am worker” to “I am someonewho sometimes works” (p. 103). Westminster/John Knox Press reissuedWhenWork Goes SourasMen At Work: Life Beyond the Office(1996b), when it publishedhis third book on men,Driven By Hope: Men and Meaning (1996a).When I askedhim if the subtitle—“Life Beyond the Office”—was another of his word plays

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(“office” as not only place of work but also one’s official status) he confessed hehad not thought of that; nor, at the time I asked him, did it occur tomethat it mightrelate to his retirement.

His original title for Driven By HopewasAfflicted By Hope(a phrase thatappears on page four) but the editors at Westminster/John Knox apparently wanteda more “positive” title, so they substituted “driven” for “afflicted.” “Driven” alsoappears early in the book, but his point is that the trait of “drivenness” so oftenascribed to men may be more accurately viewed as commitment (p. viii). Thenew title also loses much of the paradoxicality of the original title, and seversan important link between this book andThe Male Predicamentwith its centralchapter on “Crippled Cripplers.” It also obscures his portrayal of men as “lured”by hope. After all, the central chapter in the book (which introduces Part 2) is titled“Conscripted and Called,” and it concerns the fact that men become “controllers”not because they are “driven” by some internal need or impulse but because they arefollowing a “script” that comes with their having been “conscripted” (a militaryterm) or “called” (a religious term). Men control, usually by devoting so muchattention and energy to the “means” because they are “so committed to the ends”(p. 70). These, however, are the “ends” that were assigned to them by a “script”they did not write themselves. (Recall young Dittes’ assignment of the role ofMary’s husband Joseph in the Christmas pageant). Employing the metaphor of thetelevision “remote control” which men grip tightly in their hands, Dittes claims that“Remote control is much less a privilege to be claimed or a power to be flauntedthan an obligation to be accepted, often with reluctance” (p. 68).

Driven By Hopemay perhaps best be viewed as a sustained reflection on theoften unspoken lament of men, “Is that all there is?” He traces this question allthe way back to Adam who looked around Eden and asked this fateful question.Thus, “The sorrow of incompleteness is man’s from the outset—part of creation,not a symptom of sin or fall,” and “This sorrow of incompleteness, life chronicallydestined, is what is offered to man as the avenue to wholeness and holiness. Lifein want; life detoured, in a closet, a gift not yet unwrapped—this must be the mostrelentless theme of the Bible, recounted in its many rich variations” (p. 4).

If the “Is that all there is?” question goes all the way back to Adam, it is asso-ciated in my own mind with Miss Peggy Lee, whose hauntingly playful renditionof her signature song, “Is That All There Is?,” was itself a siren call to manhood.Life, she told us, will inevitably disappoint, fall short of our expectations, fail todeliver on its promises. Dittes makes this his question too. The fact that he informsthe reader in the preface that this book “aspires to be personal and . . . as conver-sational as the printed page allows,” and invites the reader “to regard what followsas my way of sayingThis is how it is with me” (p. xiv), indicates that this is—andhas been—“the most relentless theme” in his life as well.

These comments about the book aspiring to be “personal and conversational”occur in the brief section of his preface titled “Intimately Theological.” They are

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immediately preceded by the assertion that the book is “theological,” and therefore“intimate,” for “Theology should voice the throbs of the human soul—though thisvoice is too often hijacked by those who prefer abstraction and remoteness, asthough phobic to the throbs” (p. xiv). Before readingDriven By Hope, it would nothave occurred to me that it was Peggy Lee who introduced me toreal theology,the kind of theology that voices “the throbs of the human soul.”

We have come to expect from theology books an attempt to answer the ques-tions they raise. Is this also true ofDriven By Hope? As the husband guiltilyresponds to his wife when she asks him whether he rented the defective car fromHertz as promised, “Not exactly.” But obliquely? Slantwise? Definitely. Spacewould not permit spelling the answer out even if I wanted to, but a tip might help:follow the saga of the one of the five men introduced in chapter four who mostresembles your own situation in life through chapter seven (“Pilgrim”) and chapternine (“The Manhood of Living as a Son”). The answer is in the story. When I hap-pened to mention my own resonance with “Howard” in our recent conversation,Dittes confessed that “Howard’s” experience recounted in chapter four was hisown. So perhaps one may conclude that the author, whoever he may have mostresembled in earlier periods of his life, is most clearly present inthis book in theform of this particular man, “Howard.” As he represents “Howard” as “Old andOn Hold,” perhaps the title of E. M. Forrester’s novel,Howard’s End, is apropos.But, if so, the answer to “Howard’s” form of the question, “Is that all there is?,”is expressed in T. S. Eliot’s affirmation in hisFour Quartets: “In my end is mybeginning.” Or so I read his account of “Howard” in “The Manhood of Living asa Son.”

MORE ARTICLES IN PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION

At the same time he was writing books on men’s experience he was in-volved in teaching summer seminars for college teachers sponsored by the NationalEndowment for the Humanities. These seminars, designed for professors whosecolleges do not have doctoral programs in their own fields, enabled them to work ona specific research project at a major research university. He taught three successiveseminars (in 1983, 1986, and 1991) on major psychological theorists of religion.These included James, Freud, Jung, and Augustine. The inclusion of Augustinesignaled his impatience with methodologies that neatly divided theologians andpsychologists into two separate camps.

I asked him recently with whom among these four he most identifies. Heresponded that William James is his personal model, and specifically alluded tothe new title of his 1973 essay on James, “Catching the Spirit of William James,”reprinted in slightly condensed form in 1995. When asked why he favors James,he said that James “does not fret about being accurate.” In fact, for him, “anythinggoes.” Should one therefore assume he would chooseThe Varietiesif he had only

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one book to take with him to read on some deserted island? He said no, that hewould choose Jung’sMemories, Dreams, Reflections(1961). Why? Because Jungwould be a most “provocative companion.”

Over the past decade, he has written his own provocative essays on all fourof these “psychological theorists of religion.” Given the seemingly anomalousplacement of Augustine among the 20th century theorists, and the fact that he hadwritten an article on Augustine two decades earlier, I would like to comment onthe new essay on Augustine (1990). This article “Augustine: Search for a Fail-SafeGod to Trust,” focuses on the conversion through the perspective afforded by anearlier experience in Augustine’s life, the death of his unnamed friend. In Dittes’view, the grief Augustine experienced then, and now, some twenty years after hisfriend’s death, is the “clearest definition” he gives us of his “tormented spiritualsearch” (1990, p. 258). In his friendship with this friend whom he had known sincechildhood, Augustine had invested himself totally and with reckless abandon intoa fusion—self with other—that he had trusted. This friend had become like a“second self” to him. Now, with his unexpected death, Augustine felt as thoughhis own soul had been bludgeoned to death.

For Dittes, this experience represents Augustine’s understanding of the reli-gious search, as it expressed an unquenchable yearning to trust, the desire of thesoul to pour itself out, but not in such a futile and hopeless way as this: “How tofind the object of such total commitment which will not fail”—this is “the reli-gious dilemma,” the central problem of the life of one who is inveterately religious(p. 258). This experience, he realizes, was reflective and symptomatic of all of hisrelationships, whether to parents, teachers, students, wife, or son. All repeated thesame tragic story “of the pains of misplaced trust, the story of emotional energiessquandered disproportionately to the quality of the objects of that energy” (p. 262).This is the story for which he had to find some resolution, and he found it, at last,in God.

But who was this God? One would expect that a God to whom one is ableto make a total commitment, unqualified trust, would be intimate, personal, easilyapproached. But Augustine says, “Not so.” For him, only a distant, impersonal andunemotional God can prove utterly trustworthy, since such a God is “set above” thecontingencies of human life, and is therefore rendered incorruptible, eternal, and“fail-safe.” God’s trustworthiness is a function of God’s remoteness. The relation-ship between self and God that results from such a union is inevitably intellectual,abstract and aesthetic, not earthy and tender. But this is all that Augustine needs,or perceives himself to want.

Dittes’ earlier 1965 article emphasized Augustine’s desire for autonomy. Thisarticle makes a related but somewhat different point. The issue now is not thedesire for autonomy as though for its own sake, but Augustine’s awareness ofhis tendency to over-commit himself, an awareness that causes him to long forautonomy in the form of freedom from all entanglements. If others have observedhis habit of anxious grasping, Dittes instead notes his tendency to over-commit.

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Hadn’t he come to his present impasse because he had agreed to marry a Milaneseheiress, an agreement which even his mother Monica could not view with totalequanimity, in spite of her desire for legitimate grandchildren? The “fail-safe”God would never make this mistake of overcommitment, and this God would alsosurround him with sufficient light and warmth, as much as needed, to discourageand dissuade Augustine himself from continuing to make this mistake himself.

Does Dittes endorse Augustine’s “solution?” I don’t think so. InMinisterOn the Spot, he asks what is the confidence that permits one to go out on alimb, and are some ways of doing so “more faithful than others to the traditionalChristian understanding of trust and its resulting freedom” (p. 96)? He proposesfour possibilities (while aware, of course, that there may be others): the guaranteedsoft landing, clinging to the guaranteed limb, freedom as obligation, and assuranceis in the breaking. While Augustine is one who clings to the guaranteed limb, forDittes, the “assurance is in the breaking” orientation is the most faithful.

Still, in Driven By Hope, he suggests that Augustine “may have providedus with the first and best pithy characterization of living in the shadow of one’sdestiny. He set out, a millennium and a half ago, to recount in mid-life what it waslike to grow up a man” (p. 6). Moreover, he sounded the keynote, his version of“Is that all there is?,” in the very first paragraph ofConfessions: “Our hearts arerestless until they find rest in [God].” Dittes comments: “That’s a marvelously two-faced sentence, which reflects in its ambiguity a blend of trust and despair any mancan recognize. Does it affirm that there is ultimate surcease and satisfaction? Yes,emphatically. Does it also imply that the heart’s rest is so ultimate, so removed, asto leave lots of room for restlessness to thrive? Yes, that too. Only God can calmand keep us, but our relation to God is elusive and problematic. So our hearts arerestless” (p. 6). It is not that we are merely restless by nature—born “driven”—butthat our very restlessness derives from our relation to God, from the very fact thatit is elusive and problematic. Dittes does not see any way around this fact, whetherby making God into a “remote controller” or by daring God to catch us by leapingoff the limb.

I think Dittes favors William James because he is so attuned to life’s contin-gencies and understands that God is also a contingency. As James writes in hisessay, “Is Life Worth Living?”: “I confess that I do not see why the very existenceof an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which anyone of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vitalstrength and increase of very being from our fidelity” (1897/1956, p. 61). Andwhere does this “personal response” originate? James continues: “The deepestthing in our nature is. . . this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alonewith our willingness and unwillingness, our faith and fears. As through the cracksand crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth’s bosom which thenform the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personal-ity the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise” (pp. 61–62).

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Here, James proclaims, “is our deepest organ of communication with the natureof things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstractstatements and scientific arguments. . . sound to us like mere chatterings of theteeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities with which we haveactively to deal; and to quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia EthicalSociety, ‘as the essence of courage is to stake one’s life on a possibility, so theessence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists”’ (p. 62). This understandingof God and of where we stand with God may not appear any more “personal” or“intimate” than Augustine’s understanding. But there is an immanence here thatis almost completely missing from Augustine’s transcendent God, and this—forJames and, I believe, for Dittes—makes all the difference in the world.

Note, too, that James contrasts the “religious appeal” to not only the “abstractstatements” of the philosophers but also the arguments of scientists based on“finished facts.” His contrast between religion as centered on possibilities andscience as concerned with completed facts invites consideration of another ofDittes’ essays, “Science vs. Religion” (1997), published in a collection of essaysedited by Jacob A. Belzen and Owe Wikstrom. The essayists were invited to “takea step back” in order to “take a look at psychology of religion” as it exists today.He chose to focus on “the fundamental and insoluble dilemma of psychology ofreligion,” namely, the fact that one must make a choice between the language of thepsychologists or the language of the religionist, and “either choice is unsatisfactoryto most of us” (p. 56). On the one hand, “We certainly can’t get along without thepower and illumination of the language of psychology—whether that language isabstract conceptualization, clinical perception, empirical operational categories,or statistical findings.” On the other hand, “to exercise the psychological languageis to disregard the testimony of the religionist, which may be wise and reflectiveand insightful, psychologically as well as theologically” (pp. 56–57).

Closely related to the dilemma of “which language” is the dilemma between“aspiring, on the one hand, to the objectivity and reliability and precision of scien-tific method and aspiring, on the other hand, to depth of meaning and interpretation”(p. 57). When faced with the choice of reliability or relevance, “Most of us com-promise a little on both sides, achievingsomedepth andsomereliability,” as, again,we cannot have it both ways. Noting that there is no “right” way to choose thetrade-off (that is, which aspiration to favor), he emphasizes that this is “a personalvocational choice,” and what “kind” of psychologist of religion one chooses tobe “is not fair game for attack any more than the choice to be a psychologist ofreligion at all” (p. 58).

He illustrates the dilemma with four examples—Freud, James, Edwin DillerStarbuck and Gordon W. Allport. Freud and Starbuck leaned more toward psycho-logical language while James and Allport leaned more toward religious language.These illustrations make the point that there is no “right” way to choose the trade-off and that “the impediments to a thorough-goingscienceof religionare inevitable

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and great, cause for vigilance, but not for fault-finding or hand-wringing, causefor balancing one approach with another, not for feuding between approaches.When we venture to write or to read psychology of religion, we shouldexpecttofind either our scientific conscience or our religious sensitivity dissatisfied. But weshould not squander attention on that inevitable fate, but move readily beyond thatdissatisfaction to attend to whatever insights can be garnered, as inevitably partialas they are” (p. 65). If there is a strong note of irenicism in this conclusion, it isnot irenicism for its own sake. Rather, it reflects an impatience with psychologiesof religion from either side that are so focused on preliminary considerations(methodologies), vital as these are, that the discoveries these preliminaries weredesigned to make possible fail to materialize. The very fact that we get boggeddown in preliminaries may reveal another side of the “intolerance of ambiguity”that he wrote about at the very beginning of his career as a psychologist, for, as henotes, whatever insights that are thus garnered will be “inevitably partial.”

THE PASTORAL COUNSELING BOOK

If his “Science vs. Religion” essay reflects the wisdom acquired over nearlyfifty years of becoming and being a psychologist of religion, hisPastoralCounseling: The Basics(1999a) reflects the accrued wisdom of having devotedthe same number of years to teaching pastoral counseling. When I mentioned tohim that I had titled the epilogue to my book on counseling “A Final Word” as apromise to myself that I would not write on counseling again, he responded thathe would be content if his first book on pastoral counseling were also his last.Then he volunteered that, even as he began teaching courses on ministry with-out ever having been a minister, so he began teaching counseling without havingbeen a counselor himself, adding that he was “totally self-taught in counseling.”Therefore, he went from “zero to textbook in a mere forty-seven years!”

The fact of having been “self-taught” has fostered in him over the years adesire to “demystify” pastoral counseling. In this sense, the book’s subtitle signalshis belief that the “basics” or “fundamentals” are not merely introductory to moreadvanced or expert levels of competence. Rather, they are important in their ownright and not to be lost sight of no matter what additional “elaborations” might berequired owing to the setting, situation, or personal style of the counselor (p. xi).His earlier judgment concerning an association for the training and accreditation ofpastoral counseling specialists is also reflected in his assertion that his book “doesnot promise to help a pastor meet high ‘professional’ criteria and to win credentialsor ‘success.’ Indeed the book challenges the tyranny of the expectation that pastoralcounseling is identified by a mastery of information or technical proficiency orsuccessful cases. . .What makes one a pastoral counselor is something more like areligious commitment than a licensing syllabus” (p. xi–xii). If the book challenges a

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view of pastoral counseling as “mastery of information or technical proficiency” italso challenges the very idea of viewing pastoral counseling as a “specialization”(akin to specializations in the medical profession). On the contrary, it is “oneprocess of ministry,” and therefore “joins other dimensions of ministry in the callto re-call, re-deem, re-vision life into being less like it has been and more as it isintended” (p. xii).

I have noted his observation that he was “self-taught” as a counselor. He was,though, closely supervised during his doctoral program in Freudian psychother-apy, and, in 1958, he sat in on therapy sessions at the client-centered counselingcenter at the University of Chicago. I can personally recall his use of a Carl Rogers’video in his course on pastoral care and counseling. Client-centered language—“unconditional regard,” “acceptance,” “feelings”—is easy to identify in the text.His appreciation of Rogers, however, is especially reflected in his description ofthe counselor as “a presence, not a player” (pp. 46–48), and his discussion ofthe counselor’s renunciations” (pp. 64–66). In an earlier essay, “The MitigatedSelf” (1992), he had asked: “What is the therapeutic power of Carl Rogers, andhow is it achieved?” He acknowledged that the caricatures are right, or half-right,because Rogers (whether on video or in textual excerpts) “seems a nonentity, me-chanically parroting the client, bland. The things that we usually suppose makefor personality and a sense of self-presence are absent—sociability, opinions andattitudes, feelings and history” (p. 82). He is “so radically ‘other-directed’,” “sototally abdicating of his distinctiveness and so engrossed in the other” that one“does not leave Carl Rogers the therapist with the sense of having had a con-versation with another person” (p. 82). Yet, “there is also a powerful sense ofpresence. A client, or an observer, has no doubt about having experienced an in-delible personality. . .Stripped of the conventional characteristics of personality,Rogers emerges with a raw selfhood, an intense, primitive, generic presence, akind of ahistorical, asocial, arelational selfhood in a world that is used to definingselfhood in historical, social, relational terms” (p. 82). Readers of this descriptionof Rogers may, with justification, feel that he was also describing himself, his own“presence.” Perhaps this has been his own way of reframing his Christmas pageantexperience. The shepherds are players, while Joseph is all presence. And maybeMiss Gardener and Miss Swearer were right: thisis the lead role, as it requires agreat deal of self-presence to renounce the need to be a player.

In Pastoral Counseling: The Basics, Dittes sees this “powerful sense ofpresence” as based on and reflective of “a fierce ascetic discipline,” an “asceticrenunciation” that is “at least as strenuous as that of the monk or nun” (pp. 64–65).It is “particularly strenuous because, paradoxically, the counselor gives up pre-cisely the resources he or she hopes for the counselee to discover—relationshipand accomplishment—or, in Freud’s abbreviated statement of the goals of therapy,love and work” (p. 65). If the ascetic renunciations of the monastic life are identi-fiable, so, too, are those of pastoral counseling: “(1) the expectations of everyday

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etiquette, (2) the expectations of intimate relationships, (3) the expectations of per-formance, proficiency, prowess, achievement, and (4) the expectations of clericalor even ‘pastoral’ identity, as this is conventionally regarded” (p. 66). Thus, “Forthe sake of embracing the counselee with an alternative set of values and for thesake of steadfast witnessing, the pastoral counselor is ready to be regarded—bythe standards of the conventional world—as impolite, impersonal, nonachieving,and non-clerical” (p. 66).

As even the strenuous renunciations of the monk or nun do not include themonastic or religious equivalent of the “clerical” or “pastoral,” Dittes expects thatthe reader will want to know what this particular renunciation involves. If thepastoral identity conventionally includes the guide to the moral life or the guide toGod, the expert in prayer or the Bible, the recruiter to church membership, and theleader of worship life, then the pastoral counselor “enters naked of the hard-wonassurances of what it means to be a pastor (and usually, too, of what it means to bea counselor), stripped of the roles and rules that tell how to assuage distress andchaos” (pp. 75–76). Should the reader object, “But this sounds altogether secular!,”he would vigorously disagree, for the “pastoral counselor is the agent of thattranscendent dimension in life in which such expectations, demands, performances,and checklists, such provings of self, are beside the point” (p. 76). They are notunimportant or irrelevant, but in this context, they arebeside the point, and this iswhat makes pastoral counseling a distinctive process in ministry.

PROFESSIONAL LEGACY

Toward the conclusion of our most recent conversation, I asked him the in-evitable and no doubt hackneyed question: “What do you view as your legacy, orwhat would you most wish to be remembered for?” In response, he said that he hastried to focus throughout his career on human relations, and to take special note ofwhat we, individually and collectively, areavoiding, for it is in the identificationand explanation of these avoidances that we come to know what it means to havefaith and to witness to this faith. He also emphasized that he has opposed all formsof reductionism, whenever they appear. On the other hand, such reductionismshave also drawn his attention to that which stands over and against them, and theseopposing moves and forces are what he seeks to endorse and embrace.

ON BEING AN EDITOR

In the course of writing this portrait, it occurred to me that the primary way inwhich he and I have related to one another through the years has been when one orboth of us was in the position of editor. While I took several courses from him asan S.T.M. student, and wrote my S.T.M. thesis under his direction, our relationship

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(at least from my point of view) began when I sent not one, but two, manuscriptsto him in his position as editor of theJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion.I was surprised and enormously grateful for thecare—there is no better word todescribe it—he took in helping me revise them for eventual publication. When Ibecame the journal editor some fifteen years later, the care he had taken with mymanuscripts was the ideal to which I aspired.

During my own editorship, it occurred to me that twenty years had elapsedsince the journal had published the Augustine symposium to which he contributedand which was published under his own editorship. So I arranged for a newsymposium to which I invited him to contribute a new essay. I was especiallyinterested to see how he would view Augustine after a twenty year hiatus. When Ilearned that the SSSR monograph series was in danger of extinction because mostsociety members wanted their work published by recognized presses, I proposed tothe series editor that I ask James Dittes to co-edit with me a monograph consistingof selected essays from the original symposium, the second symposium, and a fewother previously published articles on theConfessions. Both agreed, and over thenext several months we wrote back and forth, sharing ideas about organization,deciding who would do what, and so forth.The Hunger of the Heart(1990) wasthe result of this collaboration.

About a decade later, I had the idea for a book consisting of selections fromhis out-of-print books. This included all of his books on the church and ministry.Jon Berquist, editor at Chalice Press, liked the idea, especially because he had beeninvolved in the publication ofDriven By HopeandMen at Work. Again, Ditteswas agreeable, and over the next several months we wrote back and forth withideas and suggestions for what to include and how to organize it, andRe-CallingMinistry (1999b) was the result. Incidentally, given his resistance to classificationsand efforts to systematize, I worried that he would object to my effort to organizethe selections around four ministerial themes: predicament, pressure, particularity,and presence. But my worries proved unfounded. After all, how could the authorof a book titledBias and the Piousobject to my penchant for pastoral p’s!

Why do I recount these three occasions in which editing brought the two ofus together? Because I think they illustrate how friendships—the male variety, atleast—are formed in and through collaborative work. They also, relatedly, illustratemy own favorite passage from his writings, a parabolic reframing that would beworthy of Jesus himself. It occurs in his chapter “Conversion and Liberation”in When Work Goes Sourand Men at Work(pp. 83–84). It begins, “Give twoschoolboys the two ends of a rope with a knot in the middle. Draw a line on theground in front of each boy. Tell the boys, ‘You get a nickel every time you canpull the knot across your line.’” Dittes imagines two pairs of boys. For the first,it becomes a competitive tug-of-war. They assume a scarcity of nickels, and thatfor each to get his own nickels he must keep the other from getting his. So theystrain and compete, and in ten minutes, “Maybe one boy wins five nickels and feelstriumphant, and the other boy wins four nickels and feels defeated. That’s the way

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work is” (p. 83). The other pair of boys takes a radically different approach: “Theysaw the rope back and forth across their two lines at a great pace and in steadyrhythm. In ten minutes they can make twenty-five dollars each.” Unlike the firstpair of boys, “They just naturally envision the situation differently. They assumeplenty of nickels, they assume a ‘user friendly’ assignment, and theyassumecollaboration and partnership. It never occurs to them to make. . . the assumptionof competition, the assumption that we must wrestle an unwilling and unfriendlypiece of work to yield something of personal value” (p. 84, my emphasis).

James Dittes teaches us many things, but, for me personally, the greatest ofthese is how to be a liberated worker. Or, as his parable suggests, if there’s men’swork to be done, get a couple of boys at heart to do it. You are likely to find themhanging out with the others in the basement of the Church of the Full Gospel ofRelaxation.

REFERENCES

Berger, P. L. (1961).The noise of solemn assemblies. New York: Doubleday.Berger, P. L. (1967). A sociological view of the secularization of theology.Journal for the Scientific

Study of Religion6, 3–16.Berger, P. L. (1969).A rumor of angels. New York: Doubleday.Capps, D. (1993).The depleted self: Sin in a narcissistic age. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.Capps, D. (1997).Men, religion, and melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson. New Haven: Yale

University Press.Capps, D. (2003).Men and their religion: Honor, hope, and humor. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press

International.Darley, J. M. & C. D. Batson (1973). From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional

variables in helping behavior.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology27,100–108.Dittes, J. E. (1957). Galvanic skin response as a measure of patient’s reaction to therapist’s permissive-

ness.Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology55, 295–303.Dittes, J. E. (1961). Impulsive closure as reaction to failure-induced threat.Journal of Abnormal and

Social Psychology63, 562–569.Dittes, J. E. (1965). Continuities between the life and thought of Augustine.Journal for the Scientific

Study of Religion5, 130–140.Dittes, J. E. (1969). Research on variables in religion. In G. Lindsey & E. Aronson (Eds.),Handbook

of social psychology, 2nd. ed., vol. 5 (pp. 602–659). Reading, MA: Addison.Wesley.Dittes, J. E. (1970a).Minister on the spot. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press.Dittes, J. E. (1970b). Some basic questions about testing ministerial candidates. In W. C. Bier (Ed.).

Psychological testing for ministerial selection. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 3–26.Dittes, J. E. (1971). Typing the typologies: Some parallels in the career of church-sect and extrinsic-

intrinsic.Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion10, 375–383.Dittes, J. E. (1973a). Beyond William James? In C. Y. Glock & P. E. Hammond (Eds.).Beyond the

classics? Essays in the scientific study of religion(pp. 291–354). New York: Harper & Row.Dittes, J. E. (1973b).Bias and the pious: The relationship between prejudice and religion. Minneapolis:

Augsburg Publishing House.Dittes, J. E. (1977). The investigator as an instrument of investigation: Some exploratory observations

on the compleat researcher. In D. Capps, W. H. Capps, & M. G. Bradford (Eds.),Encounter withErikson: Historical interpretation and religious biography(pp. 347–373). Missoula: ScholarsPress.

Dittes, J. E. (1979).When the people say no: Conflict and the call to ministry. San Francisco: Harper &Row.

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Dittes, J. E. (1985).The male predicament: On being a man today. San Francisco: Harper & Row.Dittes, J. E. (1987).When work goes sour. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.Dittes, J. E. (1990). Augustine: Search for a fail-safe God to trust. In D. Capps & J. E. Dittes (Eds.),The

hunger of the heart: Reflections on the Confessions of Augustine(pp. 255–264).West Lafayette,IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Monograph Series No. 8.

Dittes, J. E. (1992). The mitigated self. In R. K. Fenn & D. Capps (Eds.),The endangered self(pp. 79–87). Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary.

Dittes, J. E. (1995). Catching the spirit of William James. In D. Capps & J. L. Jacobs (Eds.),The strugglefor life: A companion to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience(pp. 16–39). WestLafayette, IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Monograph Series No. 9.

Dittes, J. E. (1996).Driven by hope: Men and meaning. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.Dittes, J. E. (1996b).Men at work: Life beyond the office. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

Reprint ofWhen work goes sour(1987).Dittes, J. E. (1997). Science vs. religion. In J. A. Belzen & O. Wikstrom (Eds.),Taking a step back:

Assessments of the psychology of religion(pp. 56–65). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Dittes, J. E. (1999a).Pastoral counseling: The basics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.Dittes, J. E. (1999b).Re-calling ministry. Donald Capps (Ed.). St. Louis: Chalice Press.Dittes, J. E. (2000). Recollections of the adolescence and young adulthood of the SSSR.Journal for

the Scientific Study of Religion39, 427–429.Dollard, J. & N. E. Miller (1950).Personality and psychotherapy. New York: McGraw-Hill.Erikson, E. H. (1958).Young man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history. New York: W. W.

Norton.Erikson, E. H. (1962).Childhood and Society, 2nd rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton.Erikson, E. H. (1969).Gandhi’s truth: On the origins of militant non-violence. New York: W. W.

Norton.James, W. (1987/1956). Is life worth living? InThe will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy

(pp. 32–62). New York: Dover Publications.James, W. (1902/1982).The varieties of religious experience. New York: Penguin Books.Jung, C. G. (1961).Memories, dreams, reflections. Aniela Jaffe (Ed.). New York: Random House.Menges, R. J. & J. E. Dittes (1965).Psychological studies of clergymen: Abstracts of research. New

York: Thomas Nelson & Sons.Rogers, C. R. (1961).On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin.Stafford, W. (1998).The way it is: New & selected poems. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press.

james e. dittes: a professional portrait

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