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I believe that it is largely now true that in medical schools in many parts of the US attention is being given to the role of spirituality both for the mental health of individuals and in the training of Psychiatrists. For example, the Baylor College of Medicine, Menninger Department of Psychiatry cosponsors annual conferences on spirituality and religion with nearby Rice University. I asked Robert Ellsworth to report his study to us for a variety of reasons one was that I knew Robert to be a research psychologist with decades of experience working with complex questions and large populations. Robert organized one of the largest follow up studies ever done of some 13,000 psychiatric patients in about 18 Virginia hospitals examining one year out comes. When he entered the ministry along with his wife Janet he brought to bear on the role of Minister the empirical and helpfully skeptical mindset of the research psychologist creating a set of instruments used in the study that have been both practical and helpful to those running churches. The survey reported here has few surprises empirically but represents a kickoff for a later special issue in which we will take a much closer look at the connection between spirituality and mental health. The revisions of this paper had at my request removed references to Christianity, the bible and Jesus not because there is anything negative in these ideas but because they tend to obscure the empirical findings.
The strength of this paper is that it addresses what ministers and churches actually do and as the revisions became less and less like a sermon the findings reminded me more and more of the attributes of healthy communities. A colleague who had been all his life prominent in university politics and who died an atheist who never recanted, was a pleasant natured man, whose leadership was based on, kindness, generosity, and altruism rather than top-down orders. Once he wrote a paper entitled: “Why I would not like to live in a c