published Handbook of Community Psychology includes a chapter focused on the community psychology of religion ~Pargament & Maton, 2000!. And the newest community psychology textbook, for the first time, includes coverage of multiple areas of religion and spirituality, including their importance to coping, human diversity, socialization, prevention, and empowering settings for human development and social change ~Dalton, Elias, & Wandersman, 2000!.
The current ~two-volume! special issue of Journal of Community Psychology provides further evidence that, as we enter the new millennium, a focus on spirituality and religion is important to a growing number of community psychologists. Although by no means have we entered the Promised Land in terms of our field's unqualified endorsement of spirituality and religion as integral community psychology topics, we have clearly grown beyond a few lone voices in the wilderness. Of note in this context, the 13 articles in this two-volume special issue are equivalent in number to all the articles ever published in this journal ~and similarly, in the American Journal of Community Psychology! with spirituality-or religion-related terms in the title. 1 1 When abstracts and key words were included along with titles in the PsychInfo search, a total of 46 articles, and 32 articles, respectively, were found from 1974 -1999 in the two journals. The search used 20 terms reflecting various domains of spirituality and religion.