Religion and Psychiatry: Beyond Boundaries, edited by P. J. Verhagen, H. M van Praag, J. J. Lopex-Ibor, Jr., J. L. Cox, and D. Moussaoui.  Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ, 2010.

This is an uneven collection of essays. The editors say that it was a project of the World Psychiatric Association Section on Religion, Spirituality, and Psychiatry, intended to be a “handbook like volume that would serve several purposes,” including providing “critical tools for psychiatric thinking and practice” (p. 1). However, in my opinion the editors have made little effort as editors to shape the book into something more than a collection of disconnected essays. In addition, although the editors have divided the collection into seven sections, the essays in most groupings seem only tenuously related. Some of the essays are very good reviews of a specific issue in regard to the interface of psychiatry and religion. However, some of them focus on only a limited topic, such as the author's specific research, and some of them are frankly rather poor. A detailed review of each chapter would be too lengthy, so here are some of the highlights and low points.

Michael Stone's paper on “evil in historical perspective” in the first section on “History, Philosophy, Science, and Culture,” is a whirlwind tour through philosophical conceptualizations of evil from antiquity through modern thinkers in 21 pages. However, after that review, Stone dismissively concludes that

In summary, religion and philosophy no longer have a meaningful role in explaining the causes of evil, though they of course retain an important role in setting forth the guidelines for appropriate

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moral values and acceptable behaviors. For clues concerning causation, we must turn instead to psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience…. When aggressive actions pass a certain socially-acknowledged boundary line and pass into the grotesque and the heinous, we have entered the realm of evil. As one of their functions, religion and philosophy deplore such actions. To understand evil actions …is the domain of sciences that explore the workings of the human brain, (p. 34)

Stone does not seem to consider that his scien