Fuller Theological Seminary

As one of North America's largest seminaries, Fuller Theological Seminary provides students with a university-style education in its Schools of Theology, Intercultural Studies, and Psychology. The seminary is widely known for its racial and denominational diversity, with more than 4,300 students from more than 67 countries and more than 108 denominations. Fuller remains on the front line of evangelical Protestant thought, while committed to service that is grounded in scholarship. Fuller currently has 80 resident and 84 adjunct faculty. The main campus is located in southern California, a veritable laboratory for men and women dedicated to ministry, mission, and service.

Fuller, the founding center for the study of Christian faith and psychology, remains a pioneer in the integration of serious theological study and thorough graduate-level preparation in clinical psychology and in marriage and family therapy (Malony, 1995).

Fuller's School of Psychology has as its mission the integration of the Christian faith with today's mental health services. The first school of its type in the nation, it has the oldest seminary-based clinical psychology department and was the first clinical program outside a university to receive American Psychological Association (APA) accreditation (December 5, 1972). The School of Psychology was expanded to include the Marriage and Family Department in 1987.

A PhD student describes Fuller's unique vision:

Just a few examples of recent faculty publications include works in the area of cognitive science and soul (Brown, Murphy, & Malony, 1998), the theoretical interface between psychology and theology (Gorsuch, 2002), the development of wisdom (Furrow & Wagener, 2002), and religious coping and health (Abernethy, Chang, Seidlitz, Evinger, & Deberstein, 2002).

In considering its purpose and goals for the beginning of the new millennium, the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary has set as one of its primary goals the extension of faculty and student participation in a vigorous and cooperative research project to significantly advance the understanding of the relationship of religion and spirituality to mental health and optimum human functioning.

Religion and spirituality are attributes central to the core of human nature and psychological functioning, yet these variables have been largely ignored in much of the research in psychology over the past century. A majority of the population of the United States considers itself to be religious in some way, while a large percentage regularly participates in some form of religious worship. While these percentages vary from culture to culture throughout the world, there are few (if any) societies within which religion does not play a significant and formative role.

However, the effects of religion on mental health and optimum psychosocial function have received a disproportionately small amount of attention in psychological research. Compared with the roles of other variables, such as parenting, social support, stress, emotional learning, cognitive functioning, and neuro-biological systems, which continue to be intensively researched, religion and spirituality have been ignored by much of the research of the past.

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